Inkling Magazine - On the hunch that science rocks

Crescat Graffiti, Take 2

Quinn Dombrowski — 2011-02-02T19:47:00-06:00

Since September 2007, the walls of the Regenstein Library have provided me with an ever-growing data set of the joys, whimsies, and woes of University of Chicago students, as expressed through their graffiti. At the school where fun comes to die, I’ve seen long threads using philosophers’ names in wordplay, critical assessments of the advice offered by others, complete poems, and even hieroglyphic sex graffiti.

Working exclusively with a single data set, I developed certain assumptions about university graffiti in general. First, I assumed that most university libraries had a rich collection of this kind of illicit material—but this was disproven as soon as I started looking at other libraries on campus. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the law library was spotless, the value of speaking one’s mind hardly being worth the risk of being charged with a class B misdemeanor for criminal defacement of property. Even the science library was kept spick and span, and I had to beat the cleaning staff to the study room blackboards in the morning if I wanted anything resembling graffiti. As I expanded my collection to other universities (usually stopping by while I was on campus anyway for work-related trips), I found that cleaning practices vary widely. Small liberal arts colleges have tended to be the most graffiti-free, whereas the University of Colorado - Boulder, Arizona State University, and Brown are liberally covered in graffiti—though for the latter two, the graffiti is largely on surfaces that would be difficult to clean without causing serious damage. (If you’re ever picking furniture for a library, don’t choose wood or fabric-covered study carrels.)

Second, I assumed that all libraries would have graffiti more or less as interesting as that found at the University of Chicago—albeit, perhaps, with somewhat fewer arcane references. Regrettably, I was disappointed again and again. Each school was different, and the “interestingness” of the graffiti correlated well with the prestige of the institution. Arizona State’s corpus was so uninteresting, it had its own kind of morbid interest—visions of a post-apocalyptic future where written communication primarily takes the form of frat names. The University of Colorado - Boulder’s data set is hard to describe beyond “unremarkable”, lacking a striking amount of any particular genre of graffiti. Berkeley, the first university I visited beyond the University of Chicago, had a surprising number of pieces proclaiming and discussing identity— ethnic, religious, etc. Brown came closest to the University of Chicago in content and spirit (yes, there are hieroglyphs there, too), though sex is a much greater focus of interest at Brown—nearly half the uses of “ass” and “suck” at Brown are sexual, compared to 25% and 16%, respectively, at the University of Chicago.

I began exploring other universities’ graffiti simply out of curiosity, but by last fall I realized what I had gathered: large corpora of sociological data from five fairly diverse institutions of higher education in the United States. I had my own general sense for each data set, but I wanted to look at them more rigorously and convert intuition into something quantifiable. In short, I wanted to take last year’s tongue-in-cheek “statistical analysis of graffiti”—which was published here on Inkling and which, to my great surprise, people took seriously despite the clear and pervasive methodological flaws that should have clearly signaled comic intent rather than analytical rigor—and try doing it for real.

Data preparation and classification

I already had transcriptions of most of the graffiti, photo-by-photo, but many of the photos contained multiple unique pieces of graffiti, and photo-based groupings are completely arbitrary. So I separated each piece of graffiti, and linked together pieces that formed a conversation (to the extent I could discern their intent) using a unique identifier. I classified each piece of graffiti using 22 categories I thought would apply to most or all of the corpora, including advice, insults, love, meta (graffiti about graffiti, or the surface it’s written on), quotes, presence (“X was here” and variations), school, and sex. I later realized that I had erred in making “time” its own category—while the choice is defensible based on the University of Chicago and Brown corpora, its presence was mostly limited to those two schools.

Assessing “interestingness”

Most controversially, I assigned each piece of graffiti an “interestingness” score, from 1 to 3. 1 indicated something cliche, predictable, or incomplete: One “advice-1” was We will all be alright; one “love-1” was I love Jenny; one “misc-1” was wage labor. I scored graffiti 2 if it represented a more fleshed-out contribution, a non-obvious reply, or use of less-obvious wording: one “advice-2” is Save yourself, it feels better, more rewarding; one “love-2” was How do you know when you’re in love?, and one “misc-2” was Pro’s - Eat pizza. - Con’s - Be tired tomorrow. A score of 3 was reserved for pieces with some substance or spark to them: One “advice-3” was Go to Tibet. Chant with the monks., one “love-3” was Academia vs. Love (with tally marks underneath), and one “misc-3” was (in response to Alla-kazaam!) Semantically, does this likely derive from “Allah”? Probs!A very small number of pieces were assigned a 4, in cases where I felt the content was a step above even the 3s in its category, such as this “misc-4”: Magnificence is dead. The nosferati wait. Random acts in sporadic art the graffitti on walls they don’t speak to me. Much is clever. Much is technical. Much is a knife twisting variation. But an act of art that leaves you shuddering. We are waiting. What about you? Perhaps soon.

People may disagree with my interestingness rankings (and have already done so), but the data is all available as Google Docs spreadsheets, and I’d be curious to see how radically others’ evaluations of the data differ from my own. If you can’t buy into my interestingness criteria, the analysis as a whole has other things to offer, including sources of quotes and references, genres of music quoted, expressions of homophobia, sexual vs. non-sexual word use, and a Venn diagram of love vs. hate. Nonetheless, interestingness remains for me the major focus of the study.

Using the interestingness scores, I calculated the average (mean) interestingness for each corpus, and for each category within the corpus. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the University of Chicago came out on top, with a score of 1.79. Brown followed at 1.56, then Berkeley at 1.43, University of Colorado at 1.38, and Arizona State at a dismal 1.23.

Does sample size affect interestingness?

The University of Chicago’s high score inevitably leads to people crying foul on the grounds of sample size—the top two schools have by far the largest corpora, with the University of Chicago at 1455 pieces, followed by Brown at 930. Arizona State has 507, the University of Colorado has 262, and Berkeley has 147, so there’s clearly not a perfect correlation between sample size and interestingness score. Nonetheless, I wanted a better response to the critics.

Because I’ve checked the University of Chicago stacks for graffiti more-or-less weekly for a years, I broke that data down by quarter, yielding individual sample sizes ranging from 204 to 39—much smaller than even the Berkeley corpus. I calculated the Pearson coefficient (which measures the strength of a correlation, with 0 indicating no correlation and +/- 1 indicating perfect correlation) for quarter-based corpus size and interestingness score, and got -.11. I think it’s fair to say that most of the metrics for the Berkeley corpus should be invalidated due to issues with the corpus size (do you really want to say that 33% of the quotes are from the Bible, when there’s only three quotes?) but the interestingness score is solid, assuming you buy into the methodology.

Results

The full analysis of Arizona State University, the University of Colorado - Boulder, Berkeley, Brown, and the University of Chicago can be found on the Crescat Graffiti blog, but I’ll conclude with a few unexpected results:

• I was initially dismissive of quotes as derivative works that didn’t reflect original thought, and was surprised to discover that actually, the habit of quoting sources is significantly more prevalent at higher-ranked schools like Brown (7% of all graffiti) and the University of Chicago (10%). References appear almost twice as often as quotes at the University of Colorado (9% vs. 5%), and the reference-to-quote ratio is 8:1 at Arizona State (8% vs. 1%).

• Rock music in its many flavors (indie, alternative, punk, and others) represents a plurality of the music quotes at the University of Chicago and Brown. Rap quotes appear almost twice as frequently at the University of Chicago (15%) than at Brown (8%).

• Love is overwhelmingly more common than hate at Brown and Arizona State, but at the University of Chicago the numbers are significantly closer. Both “you” (University of Colorado and Brown) and “school” (Arizona State and the University of Chicago) appear in multiple corpora as an object of both love and hate.

P.S. If you’d like to take your own crack at the data I’ve collected, or if you see your school represented here and you’ve got a burning question you’d like answered about the graffiti you see every day, you can find links to all the spreadsheets I’ve created here. I’d be delighted to see what you come up with.

This Has All Happened Before, and It Will All Happen Again: Mitochondrial Eve Comes of Age

Anne Holden — 2010-10-13T23:17:00-06:00

(WARNING: THE FOLLOWING ARTICLE CONTAINS MAJOR BATTLESTAR GALACTICA SPOILERS. DO NOT PROCEED IF YOU ARE STILL GETTING THROUGH THE DVDs.)

In late spring, 2009, while watching the series finale of Battlestar Galactica, I learned something new: I was part cylon. I sat on my couch, box of Kleenex in hand, as the humans and their newfound cylon allies settled on a planet that looked very much like Earth, and where small groups of primitive human-like people hunted the Great Plains. I saw a young girl named Hera—the first half-human/half-cylon child ever to be born—walking into the distant blades of grass.

In the episode’s final moments, we travel forward in time to present day. A newsstand in present-day New York City displays an article about a scientific discovery: the fossil remains of our species’ oldest maternal ancestor. As I sat spellbound, the narrators implied that these remains were Hera herself, and that she and the rest of the BSG crew didn’t just arrive on an Earth-like planet; they actually arrived on Earth itself. The primitive human-like people I had seen were an earlier version of us—Homo sapiens. The narrators continued by hinting that, as Hera and the others settled in to their new homes on Earth, they ‘mingled with the natives’, so to speak. And, 200,000 years later, we all carry a bit of Hera’s DNA —Hera’s half-cylon DNA—in us.

Aside from the fact that the finale of Battlestar Galactica was totally and completely awesome, that it was based on actual scientific evidence was, as a scientist, immensely satisfying. The writers, in developing their story, had clearly come across a 1987 scientific paper published in Nature entitled “Mitochondrial DNA and human evolution.” In it, scientists had used a novel technique to trace the origins of humanity not by digging in the ground, but by digging through our DNA. In so doing, they changed the study of human evolution forever.

In the mid 1980s, a small team of scientists at Berkeley, led by graduate student Rebecca Cann, wanted to use DNA to better understand the evolution of our species. However, using DNA in this manner can be tricky business. Nuclear DNA—the 23 pairs of DNA in the nucleus of each of our cells, the material which helps to determine the color of your eyes and the size of your feet—is not passed down from generation to generation in an orderly fashion. With each generation, the DNA from each parent is mixed, removing almost any clear and signal trace of history.

There are a few exceptions, however, and one of them is the mitochondrial DNA, or mtDNA. Unlike nuclear DNA, mtDNA lives outside the nucleus, and is passed down intact, from a mother to her children—a little bit like the female equivalent of a surname. Cann and her colleagues shifted their focus to this type of DNA.

First, they sampled tissues from 145 people hailing from major populations all over the world. They then compared genetic differences, called polymorphisms, between each person’s mtDNA. Finally, they used these polymorphisms to construct a complex ‘family tree’ linking these 145 pieces of mtDNA to a common ancestor. But unlike your own family tree, which likely traces your ancestors back just a few generations, this one went back thousands.

Think of the maternal line on your family tree. If you start at you, and then follow the lines up to your mother, your mother’s mother, and so on, eventually (after about 8,000 generations), you’ll find your oldest maternal ancestor. And not only would she be your oldest maternal ancestor, but she’d be the oldest maternal ancestor of everyone alive today. Cann calculated that this ancestral woman likely lived about 200,000 years ago, and that she was probably African.

The conclusions from this paper were important for two reasons. First, it was the first time mtDNA had been used in such a way to trace the origins of Homo sapiens. And second, it lent support to the idea that we evolved in Africa, an hypothesis that was quickly gaining ground among anthropologists.

Unsurprisingly, this paper created a lot of headlines. Much to the dismay of the authors, the media dubbed this ancestral woman “Mitochondrial Eve,” and her likeness even made it to the cover of Newsweek. Over the next few decades, Mitochondrial Eve grew in popularity until she became something of a cultural icon—which is likely how she came to make an appearance in Battlestar Galactica.

The scientific community, while excited at the prospects of this paper, was less receptive at first to the paper’s conclusions. Some, like population biologist Alan Templeton, decried the paper as inferring far too much from such a tiny segment of our DNA. Others, including anthropologist Milford Wolpoff, continued to argue that the present-day make up of humans was not the result of a recent migration out of Africa, but of millions of years of gene flow across continents.

Yet subsequent research over the next several years showed that, even if the paper’s methods were rudimentary, its basic conclusions were well supported by the evidence. Hundreds of papers have now revealed that all humans alive today can, in fact, trace their maternal ancestry (their mother’s mother’s mother, and so on) via mtDNA back to a single woman.

As DNA analysis techniques grew more complex, so did our questions about our own origins. Research shifted from studying just one segment of our DNA to studying many simultaneously, and the use of computer simulations allowed us to test hypotheses with even more precision. Today, millions of people around the world have tested their own DNA, tracing their ancestry back to their ancestral homeland. And, with the sequencing of the human genome, it seems that there are no secrets hidden in our DNA that we cannot discover.

Of course, one mystery remains. Scientists have yet to find that elusive cylon DNA that apparently exists in us all. But I’m sure it’s only a matter of time until they do.

From Gyroscopes to Gecko Glue: An Inventor’s Guide to Loving Life

Cameron Walker — 2010-09-29T21:40:00-06:00

You won’t find a pocket protector in mechanical engineer Kimberly Turner’s closet, but you will find cute wedge sandals and race jerseys for cycling. Today, the head of UC Santa Barbara’s mechanical engineering department is cruising between the equation-covered white board and her lab’s shaker tables—they measure how things respond to vibration—wearing a sparkly shirt and a flowered skirt. Tomorrow, she might put on her running shoes to take one of her Irish setters out on the trails—or buckle into a life jacket to go kayaking.

Turner’s research focuses on the tiny machine she shows a visitor through a microscope. Underneath the lenses is a chip that looks as if it could be part of a very complicated tic-tac-toe game: a big square with a bunch of arms, each of which has even smaller fingers branching off it. Even though it looks like just a series of lines, this chip actually holds a extremely tiny gyroscope. Remember the childhood toy with the spinning wheel? That spin helps gyroscopes resist forces that might send them tumbling. As a result, they’re commonly used to maintain orientation during motion, and Turner’s version might someday appear inside a cell phone to help you navigate in tight spots where GPS doesn’t work.

The tiny machines she’s showing off are called microelectromechanical systems—or MEMS, for short. This one may some day be able to get you where you want to go. Other MEMS can be designed into sniff out a single bad molecule, making them likely candidates for devices that detect everything from carbon monoxide to explosives to environmental toxins.

These machines are what transformed Turner, 37, from a disillusioned PhD student to an engineer powered by passion. One of the problems with engineering is that most people—particularly budding engineers—don’t really know what an engineer does. Even though her father was an engineering professor at Michigan Tech, Turner once wondered the same thing herself. When she was a kid, Turner wanted to be a veterinarian, not only because she’d grown up with dogs and worked at an animal clinic, but also because it was clear what a vet did—help animals.

At Michigan Tech, she had plenty of advice from her dad and from his colleagues, many of whom she’d known since childhood. “People tell you, ‘You’re good at math and science, you should be an engineer,’” Turner says. Sure, she was good—but she still wasn’t sure what she was supposed to do.

During her first year as an engineering grad student at Cornell, she’d sit in on lectures at the university’s renowned vet school. But that spring, she stumbled upon a group working on MEMS. She was first intrigued by the high-tech appeal—the specialized equipment needed to etch the moving parts on a chip’s surface, the skills required to design tiny systems and then build them in the clean room. Then she saw the far-reaching applications of these microscopic marvels, which might work anywhere from inside a doctor’s office (MEMs can be designed to recognize tiny changes in mass, so could sniff out a particular compound on a patient’s breath to look for potential diseases) to high above the earth, keeping a satellite stable.

Studying something that could impact almost every aspect of society, Turner says, made her realize that an engineer could make as much of a difference in people’s lives as a veterinarian or a doctor. Now, when people ask what she does, she tells them she’s an inventor. Along with MEMS-based projects, she’s been working on a nanoscale synthetic adhesive inspired by a gecko’s sticky foot. A gecko can stay plastered upside-down on the ceiling—or it can scamper as its feet un-stick and then re-stick to a wall. Turner’s adhesive uses magnets to create the same reversible properties, so that unlike regular glue or tape, it can switch its stickiness on and off. (The lab group even has a gecko mascot named Dude.)

Invention, and re-invention, shows up in her life outside the lab, too. A few years ago, she’d been racking up too many miles in her running shoes and risking injury. A friend suggested she try cycling. Within a few days, she’d linked up with a group of local cyclists. And within weeks, she was in her first race. The course was hilly, the temperature hit triple-digits, the pack dropped her—she reached the finish thinking that she’d done terribly. Then she looked at the standings—she’d made fifth place in her category.

Turner kept training, and in 2009, she won the Southern California and Nevada State Criterium Championships in her category. She’s since switched her focus to cyclocross, a sport where riders race hybrid bikes on courses that combine road, dirt, jumps and obstacles that force riders to dismount and carry their bikes.

Science comes into focus when she’s on her bike. When she has students in her lab that are into cycling, they have weekly meetings while climbing up 1100-foot-plus Old San Marcos Pass Road. “I’ve gotten a lot of ideas while riding,” she says. Her favorite part: going fast. “I do think I’m probably more insane about it because I understand the physics,” she says. “When I’m going down the hill, I know exactly how far I can lean over, and I’ll never miss an apex.”

Students in her classes get drawn in by problems related to bike-racing. But Turner, who loves mentoring both undergrads and graduate students, has several other tricks up her sleeve to engage students. Her second year at UCSB, she brought her new Irish setter puppy into her office with her—and had the best-attended office hours ever. “People are automatically at ease, they ask better questions, they show up more because they want to see the cute little puppy and play with him,” she says. “My teaching evaluations were so good that quarter.” (A shopper with a closet-full of snazzy shoes, she’s also proud of another evaluation that read, “Professor Turner is a really good dresser.” She tells a visitor that one of her weekend activities might be checking out the Patagonia sale in nearby Ventura.)

Her dogs no longer come to work with her, but Turner wants to start training the younger one to run agility courses. “I’m hoping that’s going to satisfy my need for competition,” she says. Her enthusiasm—perhaps not that of unlike her Irish setters, which she loves for their goofiness and up-for-anything personalities—is contagious. After meeting Turner, this visitor was inspired to bike to the farmers market, take her own cooped-up dogs on a hike, and, yes, buy a skirt at the Patagonia sale.

Having all of these things going on could be crazy-making for some. But for Turner, a kaleidoscope of projects means that it’s not as hard to deal with the challenges of both work and play, from an especially tough ride to an email bearing news of more university budget cuts. Why? She grins. Because with so many things happening at once, she says, “something’s always going good.”

Projectile Poop: Why Some Caterpillars Go Ballistic(ally)

Meera Lee Sethi — 2010-08-17T18:49:00-06:00

The Carnal Carnival is a new science-blog carnival that collects “posts covering, mostly from a scientific perspective, a variety of bodily functions, fluids and excretions that are usually not discussed in polite company over an elegant meal.” That’s just our cup of tea! And this month’s theme is poop! Hence, this article. That is all.

Sometimes, scientists find themselves in a position to right injustice. Back in the late 1990s, Georgetown University biologist Martha Weiss noted that animal researchers had, up to that point, spent far more time examining the details of feeding behavior than that of defecation. This, she thought, was a bias worth correcting. And since Weiss was especially interested in insect evolution, that’s where she turned her attention. Specifically, she wondered about the following intriguing problem:

Why do caterpillars like the silver-spotted skipper (Epargyreus clarus), which live inside small, self-made structures (such as cut, tied, or rolled-up leaves) for days or weeks at a time, seem especially likely to fling their frass?

("Frass" is what entomologists call individual pellets of insect excrement, and I do not know why this name was chosen but I do know it makes for some incredibly satisfying alliteration.)

In the 2003 report I’ll be referring to throughout this post, Martha recounts a personal observation that clearly struck her (not literally, thankfully). She had seen, she writes, a 4-cm long silver-spotted skipper larva “launch a pellet a remarkable 153 cm, or 38 times its body length.” Not only that, but when Weiss deliberately inserted pellets into a shelter (proving that sometimes you have to be cruel to be kind), she’d see caterpillars methodically remove the offending pieces of debris, “either by butting them out with their heads or picking them up in their mandibles.” As a result of these twin compulsions—to forcibly eject new poop pellets and to meticulously clean out any stray poop—both the shelters themselves and the surrounding leaves of the plants that host these creatures are always immaculately free of frass.

But what, exactly, is the evolutionary advantage of flinging frass far afield?

Weiss had three plausible theories to investigate:

1. Frass is dirty. Keeping frass around could create an environment that promotes the growth of pathogens, like bacteria, viruses, or fungi, that would be harmful to the caterpillars.

2. Frass clutters. It takes a lot of time and energy to build a shelter, and besides, when a caterpillar is busy constructing a home, it’s dangerously exposed. Accumulated frass could take up too much space, forcing caterpillars to fashion new shelters more often.

3. Where there’s frass, there’s a frass-maker. Maybe keeping poop around serves as an unwanted signal to predators about the precise address of the delicious caterpillar that made it.

In order to evaluate each of these hypotheses individually, Weiss created a carefully calibrated research environment. First, she caught silver-spotted skipper butterflies from the Georgetown campus, waited for them to lay eggs, and collected the resulting larvae. Then she constructed three experimental tests.

Is Frass Unhygenic?

To test this hypothesis, Weiss followed two groups of caterpillars from hatching through to pupation. Each group lived inside a small plastic box with an abundant supply of kudzu leaves to eat. With one group, Weiss used paper towels to remove all the frass produced each day. With the other, she left the frass alone (but lifted each leaf up to make sure each box was equally disturbed by human hands). It didn’t take long to see fungi growing on the frass pellets that remained in the first box.

But did the caterpillars in the “frassy box” take longer to make it pupation? Did fewer of them survive? Did they weigh less along the way? Over two years’ worth of dedicated frass-interference, the answer to almost all these questions was an emphatic no. (In one year’s study, slightly more of the caterpillars in the clean box survived to pupation.)

Strike one.

Does Frass Clutter?

Weiss had already shown that inserting large quantities of frass into a caterpillar’s shelter, so that it took up half or more of the space, caused the insects to leave and build a new home. To test her clutter hypothesis, therefore, she didn’t bother with frass at all. She simply forced some caterpillars to build new homes more often than others, by personally evicting them from the leaf-structures they’d already built. One group had to build a new home every four days; another every three days; another every single day. Control groups were left to their own devices, except for being gently poked with a paintbrush in order to disturb them about as much as the evicted caterpillars.

Would all this have any detrimental effect on their growth? Again, Weiss measured each group’s weight gain, days to pupation, and survival to pupation. And again, there was little effect. Only the group that had to build a new structure every day showed some stress, gaining—on average—slightly less weight as they grew from larva to pupa.

Strike two.

Does Frass Attract Predators?

Weiss’s final experiment involved a little more engineering. She wondered if paper wasps (Polistes fuscatus) would find the scent of her caterpillars’ frass enticing. To find out, she tore off small pieces of scotch tape, and then carefully stuck to each piece either six pellets of “fresh frass,” or six glass beads of the same color and size.

(You know what? I just want to take a moment here to recognize the intense scientific dedication shown by Martha Weiss in pursuit of the understanding of frass-flinging. Can we do that?

....

Okay.)

Then she placed each piece of tape into one of two shelters that had just been made by a caterpillar larva (she removed the larva, presumably to little protest, and made sure neither tape nor poop nor bead could not be seen from the outside of the leaf structure). Finally, each shelter was put inside a cage where paper wasps were marauding.

At last! A hit! Paper wasps visited the shelters containing frass significantly more than they did those containing beads. They also spent much longer periods of time on the frassy shelters. This poop-preference was exhibited by both “experienced” and “naive” wasps (wasps which had or hadn’t previously killed a silver-spotted skipper).

But Weiss wasn’t done. She also presented individual wasps with

“a choice of two similarly sized kudzu leaflets, each bearing a sheltered second or third instar caterpillar, and either frass or a visual control (more glass beads)...I recorded which caterpillar the wasp discovered first, the amount of time it took the wasp to discover the caterpillar, and which caterpillar the wasp killed first. I conducted 17 trials, alternating leaflet positions each trial. Trials lasted for 5 min, or until the first caterpillar was killed.”

(Lucky second caterpillars.) With these trials,

“Larvae on frass-bearing leaﬂets were signiﬁcantly more likely to be killed during a 5-min trial than were larvae with beads on their leaﬂets. Only three of the 17 frass-associated larvae survived a 5-min trial with a foraging wasp, compared to 14 of the bead-associated larvae...Again, both naıve and experienced wasps participated in these trials, and showed no difference in behaviour.”

Conclusion: Caterpillars Fling to Avoid a Frass-Kicking

Or, as Weiss puts it, “Frass ejection behaviour allows larvae to distance themselves from olfactory cues that might provide information to their enemies"—an answer, I’d say, that really isn’t too crappy.

I encourage you to read the whole report, which also contains an entertaining description of how Weiss discovered the average ejection distance for frass pellets (as a reminder, the longest observed distance was 153 cm), and—something which perhaps I could have lived without—an explanation for why the first keyword that appears in the paper’s abstract is “anal comb.”

*******

P.S. Martha Weiss is also responsible for a somewhat less scatological, but equally charming, insect study from 2008. In that paper, she showed that post-metamorphosis moths can retain memories, such as aversive associations with specific odors, that they formed as caterpillars. I know! How amazing is that? Anyway, now that we’re done talking about insect-backsides, you can go read about their brains.

Don’t Call it a Comeback: Creationism Evolves

Anne Holden — 2010-08-13T12:37:00-06:00

In Parts I and II of this series, we looked at the history of the Creationist movement and Creationism’s first foray into establishing itself as science. In this final installment, we’ll explore the latest attempts to insert Creationism into science classrooms, and discuss what the future of American science education may hold.

Creation Science Part II: Intelligent Design
The legal losses it suffered in 1982 and 1987 caused the Creationist movement to take a step back. The US Supreme Court had ruled Creation Science to be inherently religious, and therefore concluded that its presence in schools was unconstitutional. Some movements would have given up the fight, but the Creationists soldiered on, reinventing themselves once again with something called Intelligent Design.

Intelligent Design (ID) argues that certain aspects of life are too complex to have evolved naturally. Instead, there must be a form of intelligence, a “designer,” to provide guidance along the way. Michael Behe, a professor of biochemistry at Lehigh University, is one of the central proponents of this idea, though he is a bit vague as to who this “designer” may be. Behe’s 1996 book, Darwin’s Black Box, outlines the main principles of ID.

ID is deceptively attractive. Its failure to identify a “designer” means that it can distinguish itself from the religious overtones of traditional Creationism. It creates the appearance of being a secular idea.

Rather than attempting to prove Creationism as the best explanation for the origins of life, ID proponents focus on disproving evolution. Looking for weaknesses in evolution is one of the central strategies of the ID movement. And, unlike earlier Creationist movements, they have had some success.

Kitzmiller vs. Dover

Perhaps one of the most well-known examples of ID entering the classroom was in the small town of Dover, Pennsylvania. In 2004, the Dover School Board passed a policy requiring biology teachers to discuss a scientific alternative to evolution, namely Intelligent Design, with their students. To assist them, teachers were given copies of a textbook called Of Pandas and People. (Ed note: Adorable name for such an insidious publication.) This book espoused the ideas promoted by Behe and others. It was promoted by the Discovery Institute, an Intelligent Design think-tank based in Seattle.

On the surface, Pandas seemed to be a mostly benign book that discussed the complexity of life. However, one look inside will reveal its true nature:

Intelligent design means that various forms of life began abruptly through an intelligent agency, with their distinctive features already intact—fish with fins and scales, birds with feathers, beaks, and wings, etc. Some scientists have arrived at this view since fossil forms first appear in the rock record with their distinctive features intact, rather than gradually developing.

This argument is central to ID. ID argues that evolution by natural selection can’t be the best explanation because we have yet to discover any ‘transitional fossils:’ plants or animals that seem to exhibit features of two different types of animals.

Kevin Padian, professor of paleontology at University of California-Berkeley, begs to differ. As he describes in a critical review of Pandas:

The earliest known fish, for example, were quite different from the fish we recognize today. The earliest fossil forms lacked many of the characteristics possessed by fish today, including jaws, paired limbs and bony internal skeletons, and yet Pandas wishes to tell students that fish (and all fossil forms) appear in the fossil record “with their distinctive features intact.

Both teachers and parents in the Dover school district, led by parent Tammy Kitzmiller, filed suit in federal district court in 2005. They argued that Of Pandas and People - and therefore Intelligent Design - was not a scientific alternative to evolution. Instead, ID was simply Creationism reinvented. It was religious, not scientific, and therefore unconstitutional.

With the help of the ACLU, the National Center for Science Education (NCSE), and a whole host of scientific and religious experts, documents were discovered linking the Creationists to the ID proponents. Earlier editions and manuscripts of Of Pandas of People used the term “Creationism” instead of “Intelligent Design” and had explicit religious references. Central tenets of ID itself were proven to be unscientific and just plain wrong.

The judge, John E. Jones, ruled in favor of Kitzmiller, and his ruling was sweeping. In a 139-page memorandum opinion, Jones called out the Dover School Board and proclaimed Intelligent Design itself as a wolf in sheep’s clothing:

We have addressed the seminal question of whether ID is science. We have concluded that it is not, and moreover that ID cannot uncouple itself from its creationist, and thus religious, antecedents. The citizens of the Dover area were poorly served by the members of the Board who voted for the ID Policy…

According to Nicholas Matzke, one of the key NCSE staff members involved in the case, Dover proved that “ID really is just creationism relabeled, and anyone who thought otherwise was either naively misinformed or engaging in wishful thinking.”

Judge Jones’ decision was definitive and sweeping. No appeal was filed. But Creationists and ID proponents did not go quietly into the night.

The Future of Creationism

Nearly five years after Dover, the debate continues in our schools, school boards, and in state governments across the country. The Dover decision forced Creationists again to reinvent themselves; today they are almost entirely focused on finding weaknesses in evolution, without ever proposing a valid scientific alternative. In 2007, a new creationist book called Explore Evolution appeared on the market. Unlike its predecessor, Pandas, this text focuses solely on poking holes in the theory of evolution without ever mentioning Creationism or Intelligent Design.

What does all this mean for the future of science education in America? The answer is unclear. Creationists and ID proponents are tenacious, as we have seen from their “evolving” strategy over the past century. The scientific community should therefore be equally tenacious. We must engage in open dialogue between scientists and politicians. We should get involved in our local school boards, making sure their curriculum decisions are based on science, not dogma. We must instill in our own children the importance of sound science in this country.

And we must continue to observe the opponents of evolution with a scientific eye. As Matzke stated after the Dover trial, “history shows that anti-evolutionism does not disappear after defeat in the courts: it merely evolves.” If we are to succeed in fighting this highly adaptable “species,” we must know its shifting shape as well as we do our own.

For more information on the evolution/Creationism controversy, check out these online resources:

The National Center for Science Education
NOVA: Intelligent Design on Trial
Understanding Evolution
Talk Origins Archive
The Skeptics Society

Of Monkeys and Men: The Trial(s) of the Century

Anne Holden — 2010-08-09T14:33:01-06:00

In Part I of our series, we uncovered the nearly 200-year-old roots of Creationism in America and saw how they are deeply entwined within the settlement of the American frontier. In Part II we’ll examine key events during the 20th century that shaped the evolution/Creationism debate.

The Scopes Trial (1925)

The first laws that outlawed the teaching of evolution did not go unnoticed. The newly formed American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which had been formed to defend American citizens arrested for socialist agendas, turned their focus to issues of free speech and the United States Bill of Rights. The ACLU was very displeased with the passage of the 1925 Butler Act, which outlawed the teaching of evolution in the state of Tennessee.

The ACLU had a two-pronged attack against the Butler Act: 1) the Butler Act was inherently religious, and therefore unconstitutional, and 2) The Butler Act caused the suppression of free speech.

But in order to get their case into a courtroom, they first needed someone to break the law. They found the perfect subject in John Scopes, a young, unassuming biology teacher in the small town of Dayton, Tennessee. As Edward Larson describes him in Summer for the Gods, “Scopes..looked the part of an earnest young teacher, complete with horn-rimmed glasses and a boyish face that made him appear academic but not threatening.” (Ed note: See photo above—yup!)

So in 1924, Scopes was approached—some accounts say in the middle of a tennis game—by the ACLU. He agreed to their proposal, a warrant was sworn out, and Scopes charged with violating the Butler Act. He was then allowed to finish his game. The ACLU began to prepare for the “Trial of the Century.”

The ACLU chose renowned lawyer—and noted atheist—Clarence Darrow to defend Scopes. The state of Tennessee chose William Jennings Bryan, a religious fundamentalist and former Secretary of State to Woodrow Wilson. Both sides originally wanted this trial to be a test of the validity of evolution. But it soon became apparent to the defense that it would be difficult to find respected scientists to challenge evolution. Bryan and the state of Tennessee switched their strategy at the last minute: they were only going to argue whether Scopes broke the law.

As soon as the trial started, the judge also ruled that the case could only be argued narrowly. The anticipated ‘test’ of evolution was not going to take place, as Darrow and the ACLU had hoped. Their expert panel of witnesses were not allowed to testify. Darrow was, however, permitted to call Bryan himself to the stand as an ‘expert on religion.’ While Bryan was enthusiastic in his chance to prove his expertise, Darrow’s line of questioning made Bryan appear to be largely ignorant of many fundamental Christian concepts. Darrow even got Bryan to confess his lack of expertise.

But all of Darrow’s effort didn’t make a difference in the trial’s outcome. Scopes was easily found guilty of teaching evolution, and fined $200.

The Scopes trial did have a lasting effect, however. Bills similar to the Butler Act were defeated in other states, and anti-evolution sentiment seemed to become confined to the American south. In order to avoid conflict and to keep the southern market happy, textbook publishers quietly removed evolution from their textbooks. According to Eugenie Scott, author of Evolution vs. Creationism: An Introduction, evolution (and as a result, Creationism) went into hibernation for the next 25 years.

The Genesis of Creation “Science”

America woke up with a start from its post-war idyll with the Soviet launch of Sputnik into outer space in 1957. Much to the chagrin of the US government, Russia had beaten the United States in round one of the Space Race. In order to to stay one step ahead of the Russians, America realized, it needed a complete overhaul of its science education.

For the first time in decades, science textbooks were rewritten—this time by subject matter experts and master teachers. These new books stressed important scientific concepts and experimental science. Most importantly, they included evolution. Evolution was not only mentioned, but was rightly described as a fundamental concept of biology that must be understood if Americans were to become leaders in scientific research and discovery. As John Moore describes in Science and its Public: The Changing Relationship, “...nearly every objecting school board ended up adopting the books...there was community pressures on school boards to be up to date, even if a little wicked, rather than be behind the times and fully virtuous.”

This resurgence of evolution did not go unnoticed by Creationists. The federal government wanted American students to learn cutting edge science, and that included evolution. The Creationists reasoned that, if students had to learn evolution, then they would also have to learn alternative scientific views for the origins of life as well. Creationism had to become scientific.

The origins of the Creation Science movement can be traced to one man, Henry M. Morris. A hydraulic engineer, Morris was convinced in the social evils of evolution. In his 1963 book, Twilight of Evolution, Morris writes, “And today, this God-rejecting, man-exalting philosophy of evolution spills its evil progeny—materialism, modernism, humanism, socialism, Fascism, communism, and, ultimately, Satanism—in terrifying profusion all over the world.”

Morris spent his life using his engineering experience to disprove evolution by proving in the scientific accuracy of the Bible. In his most widely read work, 1961’s Genesis Flood, Morris and his co-author John Whitcomb describe geological features like the Grand Canyon that provide proof for such a flood. He also argued that there was scientific evidence for a young Earth; an Earth that was created in seven days and could be no more than 10,000 years old.

Despite the fact that The Genesis Flood was - and is still today—a best seller among Fundamentalist groups, it had trouble breaking into the mainstream scientific community. By the late 1960’s, it seemed to some that the Creationist movement was relegated to a small minority of Morris and his followers. The last of the anti-evolution state laws were finally dissolved in 1968, when the United States Supreme Court ruled that banning the teaching of evolution on religious grounds violated the First Amendment (Epperson vs. Arkansas).

MacLean vs. Arkansas (1982)

But the Creationist movement wasn’t in decline; it was reinventing itself. For years, with the help of Henry Morris and others, Creationists had been quietly marketing Creationism as scientific, and their efforts were finally starting to pay off.

A central tenet of the Creation Science movement was that all scientific theories on the origins of life should be taught to students. This included not only evolution, but Creation Science as well. In the late 1960s and 1970s, so-called “equal time” laws began cropping up in state legislatures around the country.

On such “balanced treatment” bill, Act 590 in Arkansas, argued that the teaching of evolution alone created a hostile environment for religious students. Other alternative ideas about the origin of life, including Creation Science, should therefore be taught alongside evolution. Act 590 was signed by the governor of Arkansas in 1981. It was immediately challenged by the ACLU.

Methodist minister William MacLean was the lead plaintiff on behalf of the ACLU. The case itself was tried before a federal district court, and argued two main points:

1. Creation Science was inherently religious, which violates the First Amendment.
2. There is no secular purpose for teaching Creation Science in schools, and it should therefore not be taught alongside evolution.

The defense was blown out of the water. They were reluctant to put any well-known Creationists like Morris on the stand, for fear they would emphasize the religious underpinnings of Creation Science. The judges easily ruled in favor of MacLean, and the state of Arkansas did not appeal to the US Supreme Court.

A similar case, Edwards vs. Aguillard, did make its way to the Supreme Court a few years later. The justices ruled that Creation Science was inherently religious, not scientific, and therefore unconstitutional. But the justices did leave a bit of wiggle room in their remarks: if a valid scientific alternative to evolution did arise, then it could be taught alongside evolution.

This criteria laid out the Creationists’ next move. They would have to reinvent themselves once again.

Thy Will Be Done, Again and Again: The “Evolution” of Creationism in America

Anne Holden — 2010-08-04T17:19:01-06:00

Remember high school biology? Somewhere between the Punnet squares and frog dissection, you should have had a few lessons on the theory of evolution. According to the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, the widely accepted theory that explains how species arise and change over time has been part of the science curriculum in many schools across America for at least a decade.

But did your teacher talk to you about an ‘alternative’ to evolution? If you went to school in the United States, chances are, about one in four of your teachers did. How is it that 25% of biology teachers are telling their students that evolution—the cornerstone of biology—is not the only scientific explanation for the origins of life? In this three-part series, we’ll explore the origins of this debate in our nation’s earliest days. We’ll dig deep into the many legal battles that have forced the central tenets of Creationism itself to ‘evolve’ in order to hold on to its place in our schools. Finally, we’ll examine the current status of the Creationist movement: how will it adapt next, and what will those adaptations mean for the future of American education?

Part 1: Sticking to the Fundamentals

A recent nationwide poll of American high school biology teachers found that 25% said they did discuss alternatives to evolution as part of their curriculum. When teachers raise them, these alternatives usually take the form of a supernatural explanation for the origin of life. Some merely espouse weaknesses in evolution. Others highlight the possibility of intelligent design to explain the most complex life forms. And a few come right out and discuss Biblical Creationism itself.

When American schoolchildren grow up, those views grow up with them. We don’t see the same statistics in Canada, Great Britain, or France. The debate between evolution and Creationism is uniquely American.

The history of the United States is vastly different than the history of European nations. But what most of us don’t realize is that the events in our country’s history—everything from who the settlers were to how they survived the western frontier—set the stage for the birth of the Creationist movement.

In the 1800s, Americans left their homes along the east coast began to head west. They traversed the Appalachian Mountains of modern day West Virginia, the Carolinas, and Tennessee. Communities and villages exploded within just a few years.

But when people arrived at these frontier outposts, there wasn’t much in the way of infrastructure. There were no police, no roads, and no schools. If these communities wanted basic services, they had to do it themselves. They set up police forces, constructed roads, and built schools. They did it without assistance from the federal or state governments, and they did it without consulting with nearby settlements. This strong local control over matters that were important to the life of the community persists today in various forms—including the power of school boards and districts. And it has proven key to the success of Creationism.

A second key to Creationism’s success is our country’s unique religious history. This nation was largely settled by religious dissenters. Arriving from England, Ireland, France, and Germany (among others), they came looking for religious freedom and headed west. Just as these frontier towns needed schools and roads, they needed churches. With no one back east in Washington (or Europe) to lend a hand, these frontiersman and women did what any God-fearing self-respecting, fiercely independent American would do: they started their own. In many cases, these regional churches were derivatives of the mainstream Catholic or Protestant churches from their homelands. But in some cases, these churches were so different that they were considered wholly independent sects. These included Seventh-Day Adventists, who believed the second coming of Jesus Christ could happen any minute, and Christian Scientists, who shunned modern medicine in favor of prayer. Yes, these churches were the epitome of ‘old school.’

Against this backdrop came a series of religious and cultural movements, birthed in Europe during the late 1800s, that played down the literal truth of the Bible. This broad intellectual drive, known as Modernism, seemed to threaten the validity Adam and Eve, Noah and the Flood, and even the virgin birth of Jesus. Modernists found inconsistencies in the Bible itself, things that didn’t quite make sense in the the context of the natural world. They asked questions that many curious children in Sunday School have asked for decades. Did Noah bring fish with him on his ark? Where did Cain’s wife come from? Why don’t miracles happen anymore?

Well this didn’t sit too well with the American settlers. As their new churches grew, their religious leaders touted the fundamental truth of the Bible as a work of history written by God himself. There was no wiggle-room here. Even today, religious sects with American origins are more focused on the Bible as a historical account than almost any others in Western society.

As Europe was busily exploring the idea of religious Modernism, and rural America was busy doing the opposite, another idea was making headlines. And to many Americans, it was even more dangerous than Modernism: the theory of evolution.

Darwin had published his seminal volume, On the Origin of Species, in 1859; by the turn of the 20th century, the vast majority of scientists accepted Darwin’s theory. Yes, there were scientific debates on the details—the field of genetics was just beginning to take off—but the debate among scientists on whether evolution occurred was dying down. According to Eugenie Scott, Executive Director of the National Center for Science Education (NCSE) and author of the book, Evolution vs. Creationism, “the concept of a dynamic rather than static world, already accepted in astronomy and growing in geology, would...wash over biology as well.”

As a result, evolution was quietly making appearances in high school biology textbooks. Considering evolution to be a close relative of the Modernist movement, American religious leaders began to take notice.

In 1910, the Bible Institute of Los Angeles (now Biola University), financed a series of booklets called “The Fundamentals.” These booklets promoted the literal truths of the Bible, and they were written as a direct rebuttal to evolution. Throughout the writings are dark, threatening undertones: Evolution, they hinted, was the source of amoral behavior and harmful social trends.

The Reverend Henry Beach of Grand Junction, Colorado wrote in the chapter entitled “The Decadence of Darwinism:” “The teaching of Darwinism, as an approved science, to the children and youth of the schools of the world is the most deplorable feature of the whole wretched propaganda.”

One of the biggest supporters of The Fundamentals was lifelong politician and former Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan. In an essay entitled, “The Menace of Evolution,” he writes: “The tendency of Darwinianism, although unsupported by any substantial fact in nature, since no species has been shown to come from any other species, is to destroy faith in a personal God, faith in the Bible as an inspired Book, and faith in Christ as Son and Saviour.”

Was this evolution thing really an idea American children ought to be studying?

The authors of The Fundamentals, as well as Bryan, did not stop at writing fiery treatises. They called for states to outlaw the teaching of evolution. In 1925, Tennessee became the first state to do so when it passed the Butler Act. But the passage of this and other acts in neighboring states did not squash the debate.

In fact, the fight was just beginning.

Adventures Among Ants: What Marauders and Amazons Teach Us About Being Human

Rachel Zurer — 2010-07-07T17:49:00-06:00

I lay on my stomach in my driveway. The breeze ruffled my skirt and the sun warmed the backs of my legs. Three ants scurried across the concrete. They were tiny, like cumin seeds but smaller. They seemed to come and go from a crack in the pavement where weeds sprouted and untold ant-sized wonders must lie, but I could see no pattern to their hurried movements. I pinched one between my fingertips, stood up, then let her fall. The drop was four feet or more, easily a thousand times the ant’s height, and my actions seemed like cruelty—but I told myself it was science and I’ll admit I got a little thrill. I was testing a theory I’d just learned: Ants are so small they have no “critical injury height,” no height above which a fall can cause harm. An ant could drop forever and land without being bruised.

By the time I got my face back down toward the pavement, the ant was upright though not unfazed. She bent over double, antennae quivering around her leg. Was she nursing an injury? Cleaning herself? Trying to get oriented? But then she started forward again, zig-zag stumbling across the warm, infertile ground. Before long she was back where she started, making haphazard-looking arcs near a particular crack. The moment of truth came as another ant approached her. Would my victim’s fall mark her as damaged in some way? Would her sister reject her? In less than a second I had my answer, as the two locked antennae for a brief moment, then moved on. It was as if I’d never been there at all.

Ants have always seemed to me simultaneously ubiquitous and inscrutable. Easy to find, hard to understand. I’d hoped my newfound willingness to experiment on them would open a door for me into their world, but it was clear I’d have to do much more than lie in the driveway for a few minutes to gain that kind of access. I might, for example, have to fly to Singapore and sit for fifty hours straight in a forgotten corner of a botanic garden, through sunburn and rain, to really understand a little corner of an ant’s world. If I really wanted to do it right, I’d need a camera with a lens that worked as a magnifier, and a waterproof field notebook, and patience like steel. I’m not that patient, so my front-yard taste of ant science would have to do. Besides, I’d already found a shortcut to ant insight, in the form of Mark Moffett’s new book Adventures among Ants: A Global Safari with a Cast of Trillions, released in May 2010 by the University of California Press.

“Wherever we notice parallels between ant colonies and our own societies, we should remember that the ant societies came first,” writes Moffett. Adventures Among Ants (or AAA, as Moffett, AKA Doctor Bugs, calls it on his blog) is partially a memoir and travelogue from three decades of stalking ants around the world. Moffett’s had an interesting life—he earned his Ph.D. under the legendary Edward O. Wilson, earned his living in part as a photographer for National Geographic, and earned the title of the “Indiana Jones of entomology” by capering through jungles around the world—but what makes the book a worthy read is its other half: his close and thorough telling of the stories that belong to the ants.

Moffett’s first accomplishment is that he differentiates the teeming invertebrate mass that the ant world seems to the uninitiated. In the tropics of Asia, large marauder ants carry “minor” workers of their own species on their heads; the minor workers weigh 500 times less than the large ones. The marauders work as a group to swarm out from their nest, capture prey, and bring it home. The minors lead the swarm and immobilize the victims, from termites to pill bugs to lizards, by pulling on them in dozens or hundreds of places at once. Then the larger ants arrive to smash and dismember the prey as needed. When the marauders chance to encounter another colony, they fight, but mostly the more expendable minors. “After some minutes of struggle,” Moffett writes, “one of the ant’s limbs will pop off like the arm of a medieval torture victim stretched on the rack. Slowly, surely, the workers pull each other apart.”

Contrast that to the life of the temperate-zone Amazon ant, Polyergus breviceps, an orange pumpkin seed-sized species that only leaves home on slave raids. The Amazons follow a scout to the nest of gray Formica, invade, and steal their brood. Arriving home at their own nest, the Amazons hand off their burdens to adult Formica workers who have grown up indentured to their captors as part of the Amazon colony. It’s the gray Formica who raise the young of both species, scavenge for food, maintain the nest, and generally keep life running. Imprinted on the scent of the Amazons from birth, the Formica likely have no idea that the queen they toil for is not their mother.

“Is it reasonable to apply the word slavery to ant practice?” Moffett muses, in a long meditation on what the Amazon behavior means. He takes inventory of animals who practice slavery, including humans and a large Australian bird. He enumerates the differences between ant slavery and human slavery, the most important of which being that the ants likely don’t realize that they’re slaves. “Among animals other than ourselves,” Moffett concludes, “actions are neither right nor wrong. They just are.”

Yet how they are can teach us, as humans, about what works, or about who we are. Ant colonies get faster paced and the labor gets more specialized as they get larger, just like in human cities. Colonies can accomplish complex tasks, like building and maintaining roadways, without any centralized leadership but with well-networked, redundant communication. Moffett illustrates each of these concepts with concrete examples and fascinating stories of ants simply being remarkably themselves.

The scientific process is in plain view throughout, as Moffett makes and tests hypotheses right in front of his readers. He strikes a good balance between clear and precise science and an accessible tone. In addition to describing many of his own experiments, Moffett refers to discoveries by other scientists, and gives them warm credits and cameos. Extensive endnotes to peer-reviewed research should satisfy anyone wanting to explore more in depth. The work is not for the total beginner, but it could have been—a labeled diagram of ant parts and the ant lifecycle would have cleared up a lot for me, for example.

Though it is filled with stories, the book lacks a larger story arc to push you to keep turning pages. But gorgeous photographs and smaller-scale mysteries make up for the lack of momentum. (Why do the Amazons mill around outside their own nest for a while before going on their raids? SPOILER: They’re waiting for a scout to show them a better place to mill around.) Apart from the occasional far-fetched metaphor, Moffett’s prose is smooth and goes down easy. He’s charmingly enveloped in the tiny world he studies, and through his eyes the ants grow huge. “Like a lion,” Moffett observes, “an ant is easiest to approach and photograph when it is preoccupied.” That sentence is best read in an Australian accent.

Most of all, Moffett’s discoveries left me wanting to make my own, even in my own yard. His stories reminded me of what’s possible in the natural world. For those of us who dream of far-flung explorations, Moffett’s explorer’s life may inspire a bit of jealousy, but he redeems himself by leaving us the richer for having encountered him, our world enlarged as our focus shrinks. He reminds us to pay attention, and that even among ants, there’s adventure. Give this book to any eleven year old dreaming big about science, and go ahead and keep a copy for yourself. Just now you may wind up together, face down on the driveway.

The Tippling Woodpecker

Meera Lee Sethi — 2010-06-27T23:26:00-06:00

This new Inkling series brings you amusing chapters from the history of science.

Yes, the tendency to attribute human characteristics to non-humans is an irresistible trait of our species. Yes, there is increasing evidence that many animals do in fact behave in ways that mirror our own emotional and social landscapes. And yes, it’s true that to a certain extent the scientific community has begun to reevaluate anthropomorphism as a potentially useful approach to zoological studies.

But this description of a yellow-bellied sapsucker, published in 1911 as part of the Handbook of Nature-study for Teachers and Parents (and written by Anna Botsford Comstock), a lecturer at Cornell, still shocks and delights my modern eye for its unabashed depiction of the bird as a “tippler” who “swigs” sap like a happy drunkard.

The sapsucker is a woodpecker that has strayed from the paths of virtue; he has fallen into temptation by the wayside, and instead of drilling a hole for the sake of the grub at the end of it, he drills for drink. He is a tippler, and sap is his beverage; and he is also fond of the soft, inner bark. He often drills his holes in regular rows and thus girdles a limb or a tree, and for this is pronounced a rascal by men who have themselves ruthlessly cut from our land millions of trees that should now be standing.

It is amusing to see a sapsucker take his tipple, unless his saloon happens to be one of our prized young trees. He uses his bill as a pick and makes the chips fly as he taps the tree; then he goes away and taps another tree. After a time he comes back and holding his beak close to the hole for a long time seems to be sucking up the sap; he then throws back his head and “swigs” it down with every sign of delirious enjoyment. The avidity with which these birds come to the bleeding wells which they have made, has in it all the fierceness of a toper crazy for drink…

Want more? Well, just so you know that the description of the sapsucker as a lush—addicted to sap just as surely as an alcoholic craves his morning drink—was not limited to a single early 20th-century writer, here is another choice paragraph fromThe Writings of John Burroughs. Burroughs was an American naturalist observing the sapsucker and composing his notes on it at about the same time as our previous writer.

In the following winter the same bird (a sapsucker) tapped a maple-tree in front of my window in fifty-six places; and, when the day was sunny and the sap oozed out he spent most of his time there. He knew the good sap-days, and was on hand promptly for his tipple; cold and cloudy days he did not appear. He knew which side of the tree to tap, too, and avoided the sunless northern exposure. When one series of well-holes failed to supply him, he would sink another, drilling through the bark with great ease and quickness. Then, when the day was warm, and the sap ran freely, he would have a regular sugar-maple debauch, sitting there by his wells hour after hour, and as fast as they became filled sipping out the sap…

I am particularly fond of the phrases “on hand promptly for his tipple” and “sugar-maple debauch,” which make me wonder if—when it comes to Burroughs himself—maybe it took one to know one?

You can read a somewhat more sober modern account of the Yellow-bellied Sapsucker here.

Q&A: Grace White

Meera Lee Sethi — 2010-06-07T12:15:00-06:00

We do a lot of reporting on scientific discovery here at Inkling, but we’re also keenly interested in the nuts and bolts of science as it works in the real world. Grace White is a paper conservator who uses scientific principles—particularly chemistry—every day. Recently, she let us interrogate her about how she restores prints, drawings, watercolors, pastels, scrapbooks, blueprints, maps, illuminated manuscripts , wallpaper, collages, documents...

Dude, your job is the coolest. What exactly is paper conservation and how did it become your career?

Yes, it is cool! Conservation in general is the treatment of artwork or artifacts to protect and repair them from damage, so paper conservation means that I specialize in treating paper items. Some people use the term “restoration,” but conservation is the preferred term these days because it involves concern for an object’s long-term stability, not just its cosmetic appearance.

I got into conservation because I always loved art and art history, and I loved working with my hands. But I knew I didn’t want to make my living as a studio artist. I wanted a career where I could use my artistic skills but also deal hands-on with museum objects: a job that would let me touch all the things that museum goers aren’t allowed to touch! Meanwhile, the Sistine Chapel restoration was going on, and I kept hearing about it in the news and it intrigued me. Eventually, I went to grad school at Northumbria University in Newcastle, England, and became a paper conservator. Now I work at Etherington Conservation Services in North Carolina, my home state.

Are the oils on our fingers really as bad for paper as they say? How do you take care of paper when your hands are lethal weapons?

Yes, finger oils are bad, as are the dirt, moisture, pollution and contaminants we carry on our fingertips from other things we have touched. But in my defense, knives are also lethal weapons—but surgeons use them to heal us!

I make sure that my hands are very clean, and I am also well practiced in safe handling of paper items. When necessary, I wear gloves to protect the object, but usually it is safer to work with my bare hands so I can have a safe grip and a good feel for how the paper reacts. I do wear gloves at times, but more often to protect myself from chemicals or hazards such as mold. When I wear gloves, I have to change them frequently to keep from transferring contamination, especially from one object to another, so even gloved hands can be dangerous.

But I am a professional who has been trained on safe handling, and the object is in my hands only for a few weeks or months. It would be highly hazardous to any paper artifact if it were exposed to daily crowds of museum visitors with unwashed hands and careless handling. Even with clean hands and the best of intentions, poor handling can cause tears, creases, breaks, and punctures. Paper needs to be handled delicately. You wouldn’t let a careless person with dirty hands hold your baby!

If paper put out a hit on its five biggest enemies, what would they be?

It’s hard to choose! I would say acidity, moisture, light, bad adhesives and metals. I wanted to add people, but I don’t want the hit man to take them down.

The healthiest paper is made of long cellulose chains linked together, making it strong and flexible. But oxidation and acid hydrolysis break those long chains into smaller ones, so the paper becomes brittle and develops yellow or brown regions (like an old newspaper). Moisture, light, and heat can catalyze that process. Acidity is especially problematic because so many papers are made with acidic components built in, like wood-pulp containing lignin. That makes them almost self-destructive from the start! Additionally, paper objects are often stored or displayed in contact with acidic materials, like wood or cardboard. Plus, acidic components can be formed from pollution in the environment, and there are acidic inks and pigments that can damage paper.

Moisture is physically disruptive for a paper object, causing it to cockle and distort. It can cause even bigger problems when it encourages mold growth. Mold breaks down the cellulose and the sizing in paper and can cause things like staining, discoloration of pigments. Mold is very contagious to other artifacts, very resilient, and hazardous to humans. And in the case of extreme moisture, if something gets wet, the inks or colors can bleed, the paper can get stuck to other materials touching it, and there can be severe staining.

Light goes along with acidity and moisture in breaking down cellulose and in causing heat to build up. It can also cause colors to fade.

Bad adhesives are often applied by people with good intentions, but they can be terrible. Things like sticky tape, rubber cement, white glue - they can cause permanent damage, chemically, physically and cosmetically. They cause a lot of work for us conservators. I treated a painting by 20th century artist Eva Hesse where collage elements had been adhered to the paper with rubber cement, and it had sunk into the paper. The adhesive turned brown and brittle, and the collage pieces had fallen off. Some of them could be adhered again, but the stains were permanent.

Metals don’t usually interact with paper, but they can be introduced with things like paper clips and staples, and there are also inks and pigments made with metal components, especially iron and copper. Metal particles also find their way into poor quality paper pulps from water impurities or from the machines. When metal particles get into paper, along with acidity and moisture, they can become oxidised like any rusting material, causing brown stains. We call little brown spots like that “foxing,” though they can be caused by other things, too, like mold.

Okay, you’re in your lab (do paper conservators call it a lab?). What do you see around you?

(Yes, it’s a lab.) Some of the everyday items I use might come from a home bathroom: tweezers, cotton balls, cotton swabs, emery boards, a hair dryer, a humidifier. Some less common items might seem more at home in a doctor’s office, like scalpels and syringes. And many of my tools are ordinary art supplies like brushes, palette knives and watercolors.

Some of my tools are specialized paper conservation instruments. A lot of the materials we use, such as mending papers and adhesives, have been developed specifically for paper conservation. And there also papers, brushes and other tools that have been adopted from the Japanese scroll-mounting tradition (as well as many of our practices). Many of those tools are hand-made, beautifully crafted the same way they’ve been doing for hundreds of years.

High-tech equipment is often most useful for examination and identification. Pigments and inks can often be identified by the ways they react in UV and IR light, or by their chemical spectrum, or by the microscopic appearance of the particles. Beta-radiography can produce an image of an object’s watermark if it’s obscured with ink or pigment. There are also ways to make erased or faded marks more visible. These tools can help in establishing a general date for an object, and can also reveal discrepancies or problems, such as the presence of more recent additions, or evidence of stains or mold or metal particles that can’t be seen in normal light. In some instances, identifying what materials are in an object is crucial to the treatment involved because of the different ways materials react. Treatment that is beneficial to one ink or pigment might be detrimental to another.

A 3D-microscope shows extensive flaking pigment on an old painting.

What are some of the oldest/coolest/weirdest/most awesome/most challenging objects you’ve worked on?

Some of the oldest things I’ve treated were medieval and renaissance illuminated manuscripts written and painted on vellum. They were beautiful but fragile. I had to devise storage and display methods that would keep them safe and allow both sides to be seen, because they were pages from books with writing and images on both sides. It was a delight to work with them.

One of the most challenging projects was a pair of watercolor paintings of birds, a blue jay and a redheaded woodpecker. They had an assortment of problems, particularly fragile flaking paint and acidic backing boards that they were glued to. The glue and the acidity had caused a lot of staining, but the paper and pigment were extremely fragile, so removing the boards was tricky. I had to use a microscope and spend several weeks applying a gelatin consolidant to every single little crack in the paint, and then I coated the entire front of the paper with a melted waxy substance, cyclododecane, to give the paper the additional strength and support needed so I could remove the backing. The cyclododecane also protected the pigment from moisture while I was removing the adhesive. Then, when the backing was gone, the cyclododecane was allowed to sublime, evaporating completely and leaving the paper and pigment intact. It had been a long and strenuous process, but I felt happy with the result.

Probably the most high-profile object I’ve treated was North Carolina’s original copy of the Bill of Rights. George Washington had fourteen original copies written, one for each of the thirteen colonies and one to stay in Washington, but North Carolina’s copy disappeared during the Civil War, looted by a union soldier as a souvenir. But in 2005 it showed up for sale, and after some exciting adventures with a federal sting operation, it was finally brought back to North Carolina where I had the honor of treating it.

And one of the most rewarding projects was a group of late 19th century ephemeral Mardi Gras items that had been damaged in Hurricane Katrina. They belonged to the Krewe of Rex in New Orleans and had been damaged in the flood, so they were covered in mold, silt and stains, and some were even still damp when I received them. They included posters, advertisements, dance cards, and invitations to Mardi Gras balls, some with embellishments of ribbons, tassels and metal buttons. They looked beautiful when they were done, and it felt good to be contributing to the recovery effort, even in a very small way.

Blue-jay painting, before and after.

Do you have any advice about how to make important paper objects last longer? (My parents still have their old love letters from the 70s. Awww.)

Store items in acid-free (and more importantly, lignin-free or wood-free) folders or sleeves, keeping acidic papers separate (i.e., don’t keep newspaper clippings tucked in the pages of a letter). Plastic sleeves of polyethylene or polypropylene are also acceptable. Paper likes to be in the same environment as people - not a hot, dry attic, not a damp basement, not a musty closet. Darkness is fine, but make sure it’s comfortably dry and cool with circulating air. Don’t use tape, glue, staples or paper clips. If something is torn, ask a professional conservator for help. Don’t attempt to fix it yourself!

Is there anything you can’t fix?

Fading. Usually if color is gone, it’s gone for good. I also can’t ethically make artistic changes, like painting a dress onto a nude. (Yes, I’ve been asked if that was possible!)

Not Right in the Head: An Escalating List of Traumatic Brain Injuries

Meera Lee Sethi — 2010-05-28T21:31:00-06:00

The following ten irredeemably fascinating and 100% true patient case studies are brought to you by an evening spent following the scientific trail of four deceptively simple search terms: “unusual,” “penetrating,” “craniocerebral,” and “injury.” They are reported in roughly ascending order of gruesomeness:

1. A Pair of Disposable Wooden Chopsticks

While eating cotton candy, a 6-year-old girl fell with a pair of half-split disposable wooden chopsticks in her mouth (it’s not clear whether the chopsticks were being used as the handle of the cotton candy or were in her mouth for some other purpose, but either way, I sort of relate. Cotton candy makes me reckless and uncoordinated, too). Three weeks after the offending utensil was removed from her soft palate (it had penetrated as far as the medulla oblongata, or the lower brain stem), the little one was discharged, apparently free from ill-effect.

2. An Artist’s Paintbrush

A 49-year-old Native American man presented himself at the hospital with a minor headache, some swelling around the eye, and a small cut on his cheek. He said he’d been punched in the left eye—but what he didn’t say was that his assailant must have been a formidable, and truly furious, artist. A CT scan revealed a foreign body lodged in his brain (apparently having gone unnoticed by the man himself for some six hours). It turned out to be “a 10.5 cm long paintbrush, which had penetrated from the left orbit to the right thalamus.” This patient, too, made a complete recovery after the object was removed. The brush was also unharmed by the incident—the authors report that “the hairs from the paintbrush were sent for microbiology culture (but remained sterile).”

3. A Metal Key

A 71-year-old woman was answering a ring at her door when she “misjudged the step and fell forward, impaling herself on the large key protruding from the lock. Here she remained, fully conscious, until the ambulance crew were able to remove her with the key in situ.” The fun thing about this particular paper is that the authors muse on the difference between penetrating head injuries caused by missiles (like guns), where extensive damage is caused by the high-impact trajectory of the wound, and this one, where the patient’s own weight forced the key through her skull—a distinction, I suppose, that probably saved her brain.

The woman, we are told, “recovered nicely.” I imagine that she invested in a pretty little wooden key bowl after that.

4. Electrical Plugs

This paper reports the cases of two little boys under three years of age, who, in separate incidents, were admitted to the Emergency room with the pins of electrical main plugs embedded in their scalps. Ouch. They both fell from their beds onto the plugs, both escaped with no serious long-term deficits, and, one assumes, failed to complete the circuit required to turn on either appliance.

5. Fairy Lights!

“We present the case,” write the authors of this paper, “of an 18-month-old girl who fell off a chair whilst at home onto a wooden arch that was decorated with a row of fairy lights. She landed head first on top of the arch. She did not lose consciousness and stopped crying after a few moments. Her parents noticed one of the light bulbs was missing along the arch.” (emphasis mine)

I am not quite understanding how a wooden arch could possibly be below a chair onto which a little girl could have climbed, but never mind that. What I really want to tell you is that her doctors titled their article “An Unusual Case of Lightheadedness.” Everyone’s a comedian.

(Yes, the lightbulb was removed, and the patient recovered beautifully, thus avoiding a lifetime’s worth of “and then the light bulb went on” jokes.)

6. THE BLADE OF A FAN AGH

Is it getting harder and harder for you to believe the words “recovered uneventfully”? Because it is for me. This poor 7-year-old Indian girl accidentally bumped into a pedestal fan that was on, rotating, and unprotected by a mesh cover, as a result becoming impaled in the head by one of the fan’s metal blades. And yet. “Recovered uneventfully.” The human head is an amazing thing.

7. A Snooker Cue

(For those of you who aren’t British or from an ex-colonial territory, snooker is like pool, but with a bigger table, slightly different rules, and smaller balls. Ahem.)

“A young man playing snooker was awaiting his turn, holding the cue with the butt resting on the floor, when he was playfully punched in the stomach by an opposing team member. He doubled up and the tip of the cue penetrated his upper eyelid. He removed the cue and attended the casualty department unaided.”

Later, however, the brain damage this patient sustained resulted in his becoming paralyzed on one side of his body. All I have to say about this one is that I used, when I was much younger, to be the kind of person who might occasionally “playfully punch” people, and boy am I glad I never enjoyed snooker.

8. Stiletto Heels

I like this little set of twin case reports. It describes two patients from the 1960s, one British man and one woman, both involved in “street fights” (not with each other)—at least one of which took place “outside a public house.” In both instances, their assailants were presumably female, and wearing lethally sharp stiletto heels. Both victims suffered penetrating skull fractures that took a while to kick in, with the man becoming temporarily epileptic and the woman temporarily hemiplegic. But within weeks, both made—say it with me—complete recoveries.

9. A Child’s Toothbrush

I include this case even though it involved an injury to the pharynx, not the brain, because truly, it shakes the reader to her soul.

A 10-year-old girl was having her teeth brushed by her mother when she lost consciousness and collapsed from unknown cause(s). The toothbrush snapped, and its head (which was thought to be inside the girl’s mouth) disappeared. Although the girl soon recovered consciousness, she remained drowsy and could not speak.

The missing toothbrush head was not found inside the mouth. Visual inspection of the oral cavity and the pharynx was unremarkable. No sign of injury such as laceration, abrasion, contusion, or bleeding was noticed inside the oral cavity. At that point, we presumed that the toothbrush head had been swallowed or aspirated.

Urgent computed tomography (CT) showed that the toothbrush head had penetrated the right parapharyngeal space and reached as deep as the vicinity of the right internal carotid artery.Nasopharyngoscopy through the nose showed a toothbrush piece lodged in the upper oropharynx that pulsated in a synchronized rhythm with the heartbeat.

Pulsated in a synchronized rhythm with the heartbeat, people.

10. Human Teeth

I did say this was an escalating list.

A 19-year-old motorcycle rider was brought in, fully conscious and showing no neurological deficits, after a head-on collision with another motorcycle. Neither rider was wearing a helmet. “A noncontrast CT scan head showed left frontal depressed fracture with three hyperdense globular structures in a row in the left frontal region just below the fracture segment. The patient was operated immediately...three foreign bodies, which turned out to be human teeth, (were) removed one by one.”

I think this is a case in which “You should have seen what the other guy looked like” doesn’t really apply.

*********

Addendum I. After I finished researching this piece I discovered that almost exactly two years ago, Neurophilosophy brought us a very similar roundup of unusual penetrating brain injuries. The best part? There’s only one overlap between the two articles. Moral of the story: There are more than enough unusual penetrating brain injury cases for us all.

Addendum II: We couldn’t end this piece without a mention of the über-brain injury patient, Phineas Gage. Mind Hacks reported recently on a new examination of Gage’s case.

Mad or Machine?

Meera Lee Sethi — 2010-04-26T23:55:00-06:00

Imagine the following: You’re a psychiatrist. A man comes to see you who believes his every movement, action, and word are being recorded by Chinese spies. They aim to kidnap and/or assassinate him. Two questions:

1) Does the specific content of what he believes automatically tell you he’s delusional?
2) Assuming he is delusional, does the specific content of what he believes tell you anything about the nature or origin of his disease or how to treat him?

For most of the 20th century, psychopathology has answered “No” to both these questions. According to Karl Jaspers, a German psychiatrist turned philosopher, the content of a belief, no matter how bizarre, could not be used as a criterion for diagnosing delusion. After all, how could a psychiatrist, sitting in his cozy leather armchair, definitively verify the truth or falsity of a given idea? (What if the man really *was* being followed by the CIA?) Jaspers also argued, in his 1913 book General Psychopathology, that the content of a delusion was a superficial phenomenon, easily altered by circumstance and culture, and was therefore largely unimportant compared with the underlying biological mechanism driving the patient’s disease.

Finally, Jaspers held that it was impossible for an outsider to comprehend the reasons behind a bizarre belief. True, you might pin the broad shape of your patient’s nutty notion to the fact that he’d spent three years in China working as a teacher, or to a childhood obsession with spy movies. But could you ever really trace the peculiar trivialities he tells himself each day—the fact that not just his cellphone conversations but his dreams are somehow tapped, or that a Chinese agent is the one who hands him a receipt at the place he goes to buy his shoes— to a useful understanding of the origin or nature of his psychosis? Nope, Jaspers said. Not a chance. Better to set aside the content of a delusion and focus on its form instead: How certain is a patient that his delusions are true? How does she react when confronted with a countervailing fact? It is these more objective factors that will really enable you to comprehend a delusional state.

While Jaspers’ ideas remain hugely influential, however (one 2003 survey found that 20% of mental health practitioners thought attending to the content of delusions would harm their practice), psychiatry has recently begun to take a greater interest in the specific details of delusional narratives. In particular, a small sub-field of research has arisen dedicated to examining the content of psychotic delusions centered on modern technology.

The Influencing Machine

The relationship between delusional beliefs and technological devices often takes the form of a condition psychiatrists call alien control, in which self-generated impulses are mistakenly attributed to an external source. “Technical alien control,” a version of this in which the external force in question is mechanical, was observed as early as 1810, with the first recorded case of a schizophrenic patient who believed himself to be under the influence of a malevolent machine. The victim was one James Tilly Matthews, a 19th century tea-broker who envisioned a gigantic “air loom” full of strange levers, batteries, and keys, floating high in the air above. A band of underground revolutionaries controlled the machine using magnetic forces, and used it to manipulate Matthews’ thoughts and ideas—or so he believed until the day he died.

Almost two hundred years later, a group of psychologists headed by Vaughan Bell (who blogs at the always intriguing Mind Hacks) examined a series of cases in which a delusional patient’s beliefs were closely connected to 21st-century technology. They documented, for example, a woman who believed “beams of light” were entering her house to observe her activities, and that these beams were controlled through the Internet. Another case involved implanted microchips, again connected to the Internet, that the patient believed controlled not only herself, but her household appliances. Perhaps the oddest and most poignant technology-related delusion, held by a young paranoid schizophrenic, was that everything she saw, heard, and did was being “filmed” via a chip in her brain and transmitted to the Internet in order to control her behavior; she believed, in other words, that she herself had been turned into a webcam.

You can read the full paper here and Vaughan’s summary here; focusing on the content of these particular beliefs, the researchers argued, is valuable because it provides insight into how delusions are formed and how to treat them. For instance, the fact that Internet searches make it easy to form highly tangential connections might promote the development of extreme delusional beliefs. One patient typed in the name of a chemical ingredient she’d seen on a box of breath mints, then used a series of numbers from a page describing scientific studies of the chemical as a new search term. Finding herself next at a page about Aramaic numerology, the woman decided that what she’d found was secret data about a Middle Eastern terrorist network, and subsequently came to believe she was being spied on by it.

Also, since the content of some beliefs about technology can be easily refuted by physical demonstration (someone who believes photos and video of himself appear on the Internet can be shown that searching his name brings up no such information), cognitive behavioral therapy may be a viable treatment option for patients with technological delusions.

A Novel Fantasy

A 2010 re-examination of technical alien control by German psychiatrists Dusan Hirjak and Thomas Fuchs goes even further. Their provocative paper in a recent issue of Psychopathology asserts that delusions involving modern technology are absolutely natural, because they serve as a concrete means of expressing certain peculiar kinds of experiences common to many schizophrenics. The idea of being controlled by technology, they say, is a kind of metaphor for—or mirror version of—what it’s like to be schizophrenic.

For example, sitting alone in a room with an Internet-enabled computer makes it possible for a single individual to connect, in seconds, to a vast universe of information and people, making the user the center of every conceivable experience and relationship. At the same time, the reality of that universe is unreliable, and in any case is limited to the small, flickering square of the computer screen (this is also true of televisions, radios, and virtual reality consoles).

These features, Hirjak and Fuchs, mirror two classic schizophrenic experiences: One, that of extreme “self-centrality,” or the feeling that every event and action in the world is related to you. Two, that of a “subjectified perception of the world,” or the feeling that everything you see and hear is experienced only by you and no one else. One patient’s technological delusion encapsulated both these phenomena. He held a powerful belief that he, like Truman Burbank in The Truman Show, was the sole real person in an artificial, hallucinatory environment that only he perceived. How had this come to be? Why, Marilyn Manson and the famous Chilean filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky deemed the man such an important figure that they had placed a virus on his computer and were using to broadcast an illusory world they had created just for him.

Another characteristic modern technology shares with the schizophrenic experience, the authors point out, is its ability to produce palpable effects from hidden sources: “Contemporary technical devices such as the computer, radio, television, cellular phone, internet and others...are able to accomplish tasks impossible for human beings. Many people do not even understand how these machines function.” How does the disembodied voice on the other end of a telephone travel to your ear? Are the vivid images on a television screen really contained within it? Similarly, a schizophrenic may experience powerful emotions, impulses, and sensations that are very real, but obscure in origin. Why, they may wonder, do I hear these voices? Where is this fear coming from?

Given this parallel, it is not hard to understand why a delusion may arise that attributes inexplicable schizophrenic experiences to (equally inexplicable, but objectively real) technological sources. Hirjak and Fuchs describe a patient who believed her hallucinations were coming from machines within her body:

When asked about the sexual imagery, she commented that she could see porn movies and pictures in her eyes as if she were watching them on television. She described the belief that she had a small white disc implanted behind her left ear which was actually a microphone. Two other microphones had been implanted into her body, one in her larynx and the other in her uvula. These devices were especially active during the night and it was through these that she was able to hear ‘voices’. The patient described experiencing auditory hallucinations stemming from the white disc in her ear and the 2 microphones in her body.

Modern Times

This tendency to use concrete terms to describe abstract experiences is common among schizophrenics, who often trace their feelings or sensations to a specific physical location, either inside or outside their bodies. How different is this, ask Hirjak and Fuchs, from the way in which computers have given all of us a mechanistic explanation for abstract mental processes? (How many times have you heard someone describe the brain as a computer?)

The twin conclusions the authors come to in their paper are both elegant and somehow disquieting. First, they say, delusions involving technology just make sense in the schizophrenic mind. Interacting with technology is in some ways so similar to experiencing certain disordered mental states that believing one is being controlled by a machine is an effective way of anchoring what would otherwise be even more strange and confusing sensations.

Second, and stranger: Living in a world full of technological innovations, argue Hirjak and Fuchs, has altered human experience in such a way that, to some extent, it more closely resembles “the schizophrenic way of being in the world.” In other words, our gadget-filled 21st-century lives give us more of an insight than we could ever have imagined into the everyday delusions of the seriously mentally ill. I’ll admit: it’s a far-fetched notion, more poetic than scientific. But in that poetry may be a powerful way of thinking about modern times—which often feel as if they have a hint of madness.

If I May Be So BOLD: How Charisma Can Make You Hand Over Your Brain

Meera Lee Sethi — 2010-04-14T13:03:00-06:00

Let’s say you really admire someone. You’ve heard all these amazing things about their intelligence, their talent, their power to effect change. And then you go to listen to them speak, and you have this weird experience. Their voice gets into your head; shivers go down your spine; you find yourself nodding in agreement at everything they say. When they finally stop speaking and the applause dies away, you have to shake yourself to get back to down to earth. It felt like their charisma had a powerful effect on you, didn’t it?

Did it really? Danish researcher Uffe Schjoedt at the University of Aarhus recently tried to find out. To do so, he turned to a group of people he thought might be especially susceptible to the notion of charisma in a specific form: as a divine talent.

Testing One, Two, Three

The experiment itself was beautifully simple. Schjoedt recruited 36 participants, half of whom identified as strongly religious Christians (mostly from the Pentacostal movement) and half of whom identified as secular. The religious participants not only professed a belief in God, but possessed extensive and frequent experience with both praying and being prayed for. They believed in the healing power of prayer, as well as in the existence of particular individuals on whom God has bestowed special healing powers. The secular participants did not hold any of these beliefs.

At the beginning of the experiment, the subjects were told that the researchers were studying the effects on the brain of intercessory prayer (a type of prayer in which the speaker appeals to God on behalf of someone else). Next, each listened to eighteen different prayers read by three different male speakers (as a control condition, the participants also listened to recordings of secular speeches, structurally similar to prayers but containing no religious content).

Before each 30-second prayer was played, participants were told that the person they were about to hear was either

1) a non-Christian,
2) an “ordinary” Christian, or
3) a Christian known for his healing powers.

(The truth? All the speakers were “ordinary” Christians who believed in God, but were not known for any divine powers.)

While they listened, fMRI scanners roamed the subjects’ brains, capturing detailed data about what neuroscientists call the BOLD (Blood-oxygen-level dependence) response. In plain English, the scans showed a map of relative activity and inactivity in the brain, based on how much blood and oxygen was being supplied to particular groups of neurons by surrounding glial cells. Here’s what they revealed:

Not so BOLD

Among the non-religious subjects, there was no significant difference in brain activity no matter which recording they were listening to. Secular statements and prayers read by people they believed to be non-Christians, Christians, and Christians with healing powers all produced similar-looking scans.

Among the religious subjects, the contrast between two sets of scans caught Schjoedt’s eye. When he compared fMRI images of religious subjects listening to what they thought were non-Christians vs. Christians known for their healing powers, it was clear that there were marked differences in the BOLD response in certain areas. These included the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the medial prefrontal cortex, the temporoparietal junction, the inferior temporal cortex and the lateral orbitofrontal region.

What were these differences? They consisted of what scientists call “down-regulations” in the BOLD response. In other words, when the subjects were supposedly listening to the words of Christians with healing powers, there was much lower activity in certain areas of the brain. (Notably, these were the same speakers that the religious subjects later rated as having a high degree of charisma, as well as the ones that they said caused them to feel the presence of God more strongly.)

As an aside, it’s important to note that fMRI studies aren’t always reliable—so a little skepticism is valuable. But it’s also worth noting that in this case, the differences between certain sets of scans were so great that in the paper Schjoedt published earlier this year, he called them “massive.”

Religion as Hypnosis?

The million-dollar question, of course, is what all this actually means. The biggest decreases in activity, Schjoedt noticed, were in the parts of the brain known as the frontal executive network and the social cognitive network. The former is a complex set of neural structures known to be involved in high-level organization, assessment, and analysis of information. The latter is essential for perceiving and understanding others’ affects and intentions. In other words, there is some reason to believe that when religious subjects listened to Christians they perceived as being charismatic—even if the speaker did not make a special effort to use persuasive words or tone of voice—they actually “turned down” the parts of their brains responsible for judging what they heard and, in Schjoedt’s words, effectively “handed them over” to someone else.

Most fascinating of all, Schjoedt points out that similar alterations in brain activity have previously been observed in people undergoing hypnosis.

Provocative? Certainly. But if you happen to be an atheist, don’t congratulate yourself on your clearheadedness just yet. What Schjoedt’s experiment really shows is how our expectations about others’ charisma (or authority, or just-plain-specialness) can modulate the brain’s ability to process and judge incoming information. And we’re all subject to those expectations, even if we don’t all apply them to faith-healing Christians. Schjoedt has this to say:

If our interpretation of the results is correct, our study may be indicative of a general effect of stereotype interaction. Doctors, judges, teachers, officers, etc., who are recognized as having special competencies, may all benefit (or suffer) from ‘stereotype’ effects, and this neural mechanism may play a central role in the general dynamics of social authority and obedience as observed in the early behavioural studies by Stanley Milgram…

I just got a shiver down my spine, and it wasn’t the good kind.

Will We Fry Like Bacon When the Poles Flip?

Anne Casselman — 2010-03-30T23:16:00-06:00

Question: Will we all fry like bacon when the magnetic poles flip? I do wonder. You might too (or not. And that’s okay too).

Here is what we do know. The Earth’s magnetic field has weakened by 40% since the 1650s and our magnetic north pole is on the lam; it moved 64 kilometers (about 40 miles) away from Canada and towards Russia in 2009. Clearly, something is underway. That something could be a complete pole reversal, an event which, strange as it sounds, is not uncommon. Or it might just be a “geomagnetic excursion,” which is exactly what it sounds like—the geomagnetic pole wanders off for a stint, like a dog taking itself for a walk around the block.

If a pole reversal is occurring, it will be a lengthy process, expected to last for one or two thousand years. During this time our magnetic field, which deflects cosmic radiation away from our planet, will be reduced to one tenth of its normal strength. So with that protective shield drastically weakened, what on Earth (pun intended) will happen?

“Life would go on,” says Phil McCausland, a geophysicist from McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada. “It won’t be catastrophic for civilization.” Life on earth has survived countless pole reversals in the past without a problem—they happen about four times every million years. Even without the magnetosphere, our lower atmosphere will effectively shield us from solar radiation.

Not everything will be normal, though. The navigational abilities of GPS, satellites, birds , butterflies , and countless other critters—all of which figure out where they’re going using the magnetic field—will likely run amok.

Lower orbiting satellites will most certainly be screwed in other ways, says Stefan Maus, a NOAA geomagneticist in Boulder, Colorado. These satellites, which include the International Space Station, most weather satellites, communications satellites and earth observing satellites, orbit the earth at altitudes between 300-1,000km and travel at about 8km/second.

“If you change the geometry of the earth’s magnetic field, it will change the currents which heat the atmosphere—and that means you will also change the air drag on the satellites,” explains Maus. Plus, without the magnetosphere around to deflect radiation, “the most dangerous thing for these satellites is high levels of radiation,” he says.

Things won’t be completely normal down here on Earth’s surface, either. For one thing, we’ll be privy to a rocking aurora show, says McCausland. Aurora borealis, also known as the northern lights, are usually sighted up near the north magnetic pole, where the magnetic field is weak. However during a pole reversal, when the magnetic field is weakened across the globe, aurora will be visible at most latitudes as charged particles hit the upper atmosphere. They’ll give us a light show as they dissipate their energy.

What about the weather? Recent studies have found links between the levels of cosmic radiation and cloud cover on Earth. Even though the observed effect is very small, during a pole reversal the increased amount of cosmic ray particles hitting our upper atmosphere could send our climate reeling in the lower atmosphere by nucleating clouds and changing weather patterns, wreaking even more climatic havoc than global warming is already causing, hypothesizes McCausland.

No one is exactly sure of how long all these changes will take to transpire. The widely accepted time frame is 1,000 to 2,000 years, but it could be quicker—much quicker. “There’s still an outside possibility that something could happen as quickly as 40 to 50 years,” says McCausland. “It’s unlikely, but it’s possible.“

Paper road atlas, anyone?

Do Be So Sentimental

Meera Lee Sethi — 2010-03-15T16:34:00-06:00

There is a scene in the 1983 Soviet film Nostalghia, made by the brooding and metaphysical director Andrei Tarkovsky, which lasts more than eight and a half minutes and was shot in a single take. In it, a man in a long gray coat lights a candle, cups it in his hand, and begins to walk slowly across the surface of an emptied pool, turning his body from one direction to another to keep the wind at his back and the candle’s flame burning.

Though he sometimes makes it almost all the way across the pool, time and again the fire sputters out before he reaches his destination. When it does so, he returns to his starting position to light it once more and start his walk over. As he staggers back to the beginning over and over, he seems both defeated and resolute. The scene evokes a Sisyphean sense of purpose, the man’s act seeming suffused with the desire to reach a place that may not even exist. It is an apt metaphor for the ache of nostalgia.

Nostalgia’s literal meaning is the pain evoked by the desire to return home—and, for many, it is indeed a painful, or at least bittersweet, experience. After the word’s invention in the 17th century, it was considered a psychiatric disease for a long time. More recently, it’s been called a form of depression. Yet we all, no matter how young or old, feel the pull of nostalgia. Why? Does this wistful longing serve a useful purpose?

A slew of recent social psychology research has uncovered some surprising findings about nostalgia, with scientists teasing apart a few of the possible evolutionary functions it serves. Here are a few of the roles sentimentality, it seems, may play in our lives:

Mitigating Memento Mori

According to the theory within psychology known as “terror management,” human beings (capable, unlike other species, of becoming conscious of their own mortality) engage in a variety of unconscious psychological protections to manage the abject fear they feel when confronted with reminders of their impending deaths. Nostalgia appears to be one such management strategy.

In one experiment, some participants were given a writing prompt that actively encouraged them to wax nostalgic about an important event in their lives, while others were asked to free-write about an ordinary event from the previous week. When given a word-completion task in which several word fragments could be completed with either a neutral or a death-related word (for example, the fragment COFF_ _ could be completed as COFFEE or COFFIN), those who had been manipulated into feeling nostalgic were less likely to create “death-words.” In other words, if you’ve just been feeling nostalgic, you’re less likely to be thinking about death at all.

In another experiment, researchers first collected a personality measurement from their subjects that gauged how prone they were to think about the past and how positively they viewed it. Then, they induced one group of participants to reflect on their own deaths by asking them to write responses to the questions: “Briefly describe the emotions that the thought of your own death arouses in you” and “Jot down, as specifically as you can, what you think will happen to you physically as you die and once you are physically dead.” Another group was asked to answer similarly provocative questions—only their topic was the emotional and physical discomfort associated with having a painful dental procedure.

After having all the participants complete a final questionnaire examining how meaningful they believed life to be, correlations between the three tests were calculated. As hypothesized, among those who were asked to reflect on their own mortality, “the more positively participants viewed their past, the less they perceived life to be meaningless.” There was no significant correlation between the two characteristics in those who reflected on dental procedures. What this suggests, the scientists concluded, is that if you’re generally a nostalgic person, and you’re confronted with the concept of death, your tendency towards nostalgia may kick in to help to imbue life with meaning. In doing so, it helps to ease your fear of death.

Fighting Loneliness

Scientists have known for some time that chronic loneliness has detrimental effects on health. Since there is evidence that loneliness can trigger nostalgia, could it be that reminiscing somehow counteracts those feelings of isolation?

To find out, Sun Yat-Sen University’s Xinyue Zhou conducted a series of experiments on children, university students, and factory workers. In one, they tested kids who had recently moved from rural China to big cities, and were especially likely to be feeling set adrift from their social support network. The results of a detailed psychological analysis of these children showed that those who were the most lonely were also, often, the most nostalgic. And their nostalgia appeared to restore their sense that they were connected to others (by reminding them of friends and family).

These and other experiments led the scientists to conclude that nostalgia “magnifies perceptions of social support and, in so doing, thwarts the effect of loneliness. Nostalgia restores an individual’s social connectedness.” They also found that “the association between loneliness and nostalgia is particularly pronounced among highly resilient individuals. It is these individuals who, when lonely, report high levels of nostalgia.” So—contrary to the notion that sentimentality makes a person weak—the tougher you are, the more likely you are to reflect fondly on the past.

Ego-Boosting and Identity-Building

Nostalgia plays at least two other useful functions. Not surprisingly, it tends to bring to the forefront positive experiences we wish to remember. In the lab, when scientists successfully evoked feelings of nostalgia in subjects, they later reported a greater sense of “positive self-regard and positive affect”: it helped them feel prouder of themselves and happier in general.

Nostalgia is also a pathway for exploring many different versions of ourselves, enabling us to construct a coherent self-identity that incorporates both past and present. This can be difficult when, for example, people are displaced from a familiar and well-loved environment. In two studies, researchers found that nostalgia helped to decrease anxiety and maintain a sense of self in coffee shop employees whose old workplace was moved, as well as in university professors whose institution was taken over by what felt like a hostile force.

In light of these fascinating studies, it’s hard to resist the temptation to sit down with a box of old photographs for an afternoon or two. But if you do, hold the image of Tarkovsky’s hero crossing the pool with a sputtering candle in your mind, as well. If reminiscence threatens to pull us backwards, to a world that is long gone and can never be reached, it may truly be fair to call it a disease.

Please Pass the Astragalus

Anya Weber — 2010-03-04T19:53:00-06:00

In 1798, the British economist Thomas Malthus argued that as the world’s population increased exponentially (and agricultural production scrambled to keep up), we would eventually find ourselves starving, miserable, and warring over our scarce resources. This hypothetical state of affairs has since come to be known as a “Malthusian catastrophe,” and it’s an idea Ernesto Robles plays with in his debut novel.

The scientific thriller The Malthusian Catastrophe revolves around an herbal supplement that appears to slow, or even stop, aging. When Michael Jeffs, a recent business-school grad, takes a job as head of distribution for Aseso Nutraceuticals, all he knows about the company is that their main product—an herbal supplement called Sinsen—is flying off the shelves. While Aseso does no marketing and makes no claims about the efficacy of Sinsen, the company is doing a brisk business, largely due to a body of supplement users who believe it to be the fountain of youth in pill form. Does Sinsen really stop the aging process? Is it all a scam? Or is there something darker going on?

Robles’ debut has a decent plot, and his story raises a number of interesting ethical questions. If a pill were available that would keep you looking and feeling young indefinitely, would you take it? What if your spouse or partner took it and you didn’t? How would it impact society to be suddenly filled with a thriving population of seventy-year-olds who look thirty? And how would economic forces impact the production and availability of an immortality supplement?

Unfortunately, the impact The Malthusian Catastrophe might otherwise make is marred by flat characters and wooden writing. Though there are few hard and fast rules for writing, one basic principle is to “show, not tell;” Robles often shows and tells. ("Joon was impressed with what Aseso had achieved. ‘Man, I can’t believe what you guys have accomplished...’") Much of the dialogue has a B-movie feel: “It is not very effective to have the best intentions but with no way to act on them. It is too dangerous now to share the technology with others. We have to control the technology ourselves.”

But what about the science in the book? Let’s take the novel’s main plot points, and see how they stack up against real-world research.

Plot point: Sinsen’s creators perform research trials overseas to avoid U.S. government oversight.

Quote: “They could perform human trials in Laos...Relatively small amounts of capital would be necessary to conduct experiments that could prove the efficacy of David’s drug, and there would be next to no government intervention.”

Credibility Rating: High. More and more biotech companies are avoiding the astronomical costs of FDA approval by performing their clinical trials overseas. It makes sense that Aseso would use this same approach, especially if they were deliberately trying to stay under the radar.

Plot point: The secret of eternal youth lies in preventing the shortening of telomeres, DNA sequences at the ends of chromosomes.

Quote: “David’s starting point was the theory that telomeres, the protective ends of chromosomes, became shorter during cellular replication, and that the shortening of telomeres led to the loss of genetic information and eventually to cellular senescence.”

Credibility rating: Fairly high. Telomeres do indeed protect the ends of chromosomes from molecular attack. They also shorten during every cell division, so as humans age, our telomeres get shorter. And rebuilding telomeres has been shown to decrease genetic damage in people with Werners Syndrome, a disease that causes premature aging.

Plot point: Messing around with telomeres has unforeseen consequences in the body.

Quote:All quotes about this plot point would serve as major spoilers, so I’m omitting one here.

Credibility rating: High. Telomeres are the genetic equivalent of those plastic tips on shoelaces—they protect the ends of chromosomes. Making changes to the structure and function of the body’s telomeres could certainly open the door to disastrous genetic consequences.

Plot point: Sinsen, the anti-aging supplement, is made from astragalus root.

Quote: “David discovered that a molecule found in the root of the Astragalus plant, used in traditional Chinese medicine, was a natural telomerase activator.”

Credibility rating: Medium-low. The NIH’s National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine confirms that astragalus is used in Chinese medicine as an immune booster, but says that clinical efficacy trials have been too small and preliminary to be conclusive. This is an active area of research, however. From the same website: “NCCAM-funded investigators are studying the effects of astragalus on the body, particularly on the immune system.”

In a related side-note, the FDA recently slapped the wrist of integrative-medicine guru Dr. Andrew Weil for claiming that an astragalus-root combo supplement for sale on his site had flu-preventive qualities.

And this gorgeous infographic, built from the results of over 1,500 studies, places astragalus well below the “worth-it line” among health supplements. Perhaps fish oil would have been a more realistic main ingredient for Sinsen?

Plot point: Aseso can get away with marketing Sinsen without much regulation because it is considered a dietary supplement, not a drug.

Quote: “Unlike drugs, which had to go through multiple testing phases, nutritional supplements could be marketed and sold freely in the United States.”

Credibility: High. The Food and Drug Administration only steps in to regulate dietary supplements if there are reports of health issues or false claims made by their distributors.

Also, food imported into the USA from overseas (such as the astragalus root used to produce Sinsen in the novel) is, again, not regulated by the FDA; the onus for quality and safety control falls entirely on the overseas grower and distributor.

Overall, Robles has done a credible job vetting the science he plays with in his book. Too bad his fiction isn’t much to write home about.

To find out more about Robles and his book, visit his website, or listen to a radio interview the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies conducted with the author.

Q&A: Diana Sudyka

Meera Lee Sethi — 2010-02-26T13:13:00-06:00

Diana Sudyka is a freelance illustrator and amateur birder whose passions come together in The Tiny Aviary, a blog where she showcases her paintings of birds. Diana and I volunteer together behind the scenes at Chicago’s Field Museum, and recently I asked her to tell me more about how she combines art and science.

You’re a trained artist who’s designed band posters, book jackets, invitations, and commissioned paintings. How did you get into creating natural history paintings of birds? And what does taxidermy have to do with it?

I grew up watching PBS nature specials and looking at old encyclopedias with beautiful color illustrations of plants and animals. A lot of my childhood was also spent outdoors, exploring forests and climbing trees. I wanted to learn more about what I was seeing in those forests. A favorite aunt gave me a Peterson bird guide; I carried the book everywhere. I remember being on a field trip in third grade to the Field Museum of Natural history, and referring to it while looking at bird dioramas. Adolescence hit, and my interest waned until after college, when I moved to Chicago, and began to crave some connection to nature again. Out came my tattered Peterson guide, and off I went on weekends to hike, camp, and bird watch in parks, or along Lake Michigan. Those hikes became a way for me to learn about and appreciate that natural history of Illinois and the Midwest, and birds provided my first window in to that appreciation.

Several years ago, I was introduced to a Field Museum ornithologist. I work from a home studio as an illustrator, and wanted to volunteer once a week to get out of the house. The ornithologist was Dave Willard, the Bird Division’s collections manager. Dave asked if I would be willing to make study skins of birds for the collections. I was never specifically interested in taxidermy per se, but liked the idea of using my hands and learning about avian anatomy. I was so excited to be working with scientists. Every week I would come home tremendously inspired. To document the experience, I began The Tiny Aviary. I did quick watercolor sketches of every species of bird I prepared, and wrote about them. It helped me to cement what I was learning every week. The blog and my paintings gradually evolved into something broader than just documenting my museum experience. It was a way to share my work, and my love of natural history and science.

Describe your typical painting process.

My main medium is watercolor. I usually start with a couple of preliminary pencil sketches. I tend to work from photographs more than specimens, but do use both. One of the great things about volunteering at the Field is having access to the phenomenal specimen collections. Dr. Willard has been generous in making the bird collection accessible to not only biologists and other researchers, but to artists as well. When I go in to work from a specimen, it is with the intent on making as accurate a rendering as possible. In general, though, most of my paintings don’t strive to be very anatomically or scientifically accurate. I’m not counting primary and secondary feathers. Straightforward scientific illustration has never been a goal, and I don’t
think I would be very good at it. I try to get the overall character of a given species, and then try to infuse it with something more personal.

There’s a long tradition of natural history illustration dedicated to depicting animals in their natural environments. You typically do the same—but you’ve also used a starker eye, as in the painting below. Photographer Andrew Zuckerman is engaged in creating yet another kind of image, one that removes creatures from their habitats entirely. Do you have a philosophy about the ideal form scientific illustration should take?

Zuckerman’s birds, being entirely removed from their habitats, have an abstract quality. At the same time, the photos employ elements of traditional portraiture. The visual isolation of subjects is also what guide books do, in a way. Open a Peterson or Sibley guide, and you have these little paintings of birds on a white background, completely removed from their habitat. This is obviously to make it easier to note field marks in identifying a particular species of bird. I see what Audubon and other naturalist illustrators of that time were doing as the traditional portraiture end of the spectrum. People who bought Audubon’s Birds of North America most likely never had any intention of setting foot in the field. Through the book, they could get a taste of what seeing a particular bird in its natural habitat might have been like without having to trudge through forest and swamp. Those images also conveyed something of Audubon and his aesthetic vision.

My ideal form of scientific illustration would be one that allows for a personal aesthetic, and a connection to the subject to shine through without compromising scientific accuracy. I think there are very few illustrators that are able to balance this well. C.F. Tunnicliffe, Louis Agassiz Fuertes, and even Charley Harper come to mind. There was a exhibit at the Field museum last year of some of Fuertes’s paintings. They were scientifically precise, but his hand was very much present in those lively renderings.

Do you ever, like Audubon, draw from life, through a telescope or binoculars?

I haven’t tried to do this yet. I have also never tried to eat any of the bird species I have painted, as Audubon supposedly ate almost everything he shot.

Your work at the Field Museum has a clear scientific purpose. In what ways do you think your paintings contribute to or participate in the same scientific spirit?

What I do at the Field becomes part of the collections there, and ideally will be used by future generations of scientists to further our understanding of the natural world. I do see my paintings as an extension of that work, but outside of the context of that specific community. The paintings are initially for me and my education. They are a way to indulge the passion I have for science and the natural world. By putting those images on my blog, and writing about them and my museum experience, I am hoping to engage other lay persons like myself. I want to foster an appreciation for nature and what biologists do, as well as an awareness of the diversity of life with which we share space; even densely urban space such as Chicago.

As a corollary, in what ways does going away and painting a bird differ from preparing a study skin of the same bird?

Preparing a study skin is a meditative process for me. I have to be focused, as there is a clear sequence of steps to follow in order to get the skin off intact without causing damage to the feathers. Ideally, once you begin the process, it’s best to follow through the steps to the end without interruption. A small bird such as a warbler takes me roughly 45 minutes to complete. A large raptor can take two hours or more. It’s not only a meditation on process, but it is also on that particular bird. I find myself thinking: How did it die? Was it feeding well? Was it able to breed? And so on. When I am away from the lab and creating a painting of a bird that I have worked on, it’s a different type of experience, of course. I don’t have the bird and the reality
of its presence in front of me any more. I have the visual impression that it left in my mind, as well as any scientific or anecdotal information that I was able to glean from one of the ornithologists. How I interpret all of that visually can be a very organic, subjective process.

Which of the bird paintings on Tiny Aviary is your favorite, and why?

I did some studies for an art show called “The Exquisite City,” put together by Kathleen Judge. Kathleen gathered a bunch of Chicago artists to create buildings out of cardboard. The buildings were displayed in a gallery with a soundtrack of common urban sounds (car traffic, trains, etc.). Walking around the gallery gave you the sense of being immersed in this small, fantastical city.

Instead of a building she asked me to do several paintings of birds that either live in or migrate through a city like Chicago. I wanted the paintings to bring awareness to how many species, while migrating through urban areas, die by colliding with building windows. My favorite two Tiny Aviary paintings were part of that series. One you already mentioned: the two study skins of Yellow-bellied Sapsuckers (Sphyrapicus varius). The other is of an American Woodcock (Scolopax minor). I achieved an accuracy in these studies that I don’t normally strive for and hadn’t attained in my previous watercolors.

You paint many native birds and migratory species that travel through the U.S., but you also paint birds that you’ve never seen (or never will, since they’re extinct). Which of these would you most like to see?

The bird that I would most like to see still exists, but is extremely rare. Kakapos are large, flightless parrots endemic to New Zealand. They look like large, green owls. They are no longer on the mainland, due to introduced predators. Some time ago the remaining population was relocated to small islands off of the New Zealand coast, and are very closely monitored.

I can’t think of a person I know who doesn’t find birds fascinating. What’s your take on why they capture our minds and hearts so strongly?

On the surface, there is the fact that they can fly and we have always been fascinated by flight. They are beautiful of course; the range of plumage color, and their often melodious calls. Their annual migrations often mark the seasons for us. Perhaps it is an issue of accessibility too. So many people are bird watching now, and I think in part that is because it is a relatively easy way to engage with nature and the returns are great. You don’t have to put a lot in to it. Meaning, you don’t necessarily have to travel to another country, slog through some malaria infested jungle, or even get in your car to see something wonderful. If anyone takes a little bit of time to educate themselves, even the most seemingly banal and ubiquitous of species will become fascinating, such as starlings and pigeons.

Please tell us a story you love to tell, either about a bird or an ornithologist.

One of my favorite stories regarding birds, and bird behavior specifically, has to do with the Antarctic Explorer Apsley Cherry Garrard. Garrard wrote The Worst Journey in the World, a memoir of the time he spent in Antarctica with Robert Falcon Scott’s expedition to the South Pole. Garrard’s favorite inhabitants of that continent were the Adélie Penguins. Years after returning home to England, he became an outspoken advocate for their protection.

Part of Adélie courtship behavior involves stones. Adélies make their nests on the ground out of stones, and a worthy mate will present his chosen with a rock for such a purpose. Garrard was a shy man, and particularly shy around women. It wasn’t until quite late in life that he met and fell in love with a woman that would become his wife. She cherished his stories of the Antarctic and of his favorite birds the Adélies. Many months had passed since they had first met, and one day while sitting on a park bench Garrard leaned over and picked a stone up off the ground and placed it beside her. She immediately understood the meaning of the gesture.

You can visit Diana at her fine art website, purchase prints of her work on Etsy, or follow her on The Tiny Aviary.

More Valentine’s Gifts for Scientist-Types

Meera Lee Sethi — 2010-02-12T20:15:00-06:00

Okay, so scientists have already proven that Valentine’s Day acts as a catalyst for breakups, causing those in weak or deteriorating relationships to decide to call it quits sooner rather than later. So what? You’re not in one of those. Your love is strong and growing tougher by the minute. And (if you’re reading us) you’ve probably got a sweetheart of a science-geek for a partner.

Well, then, have we got some ideas for you this February 14th. And hey, if you do happen to be on rocky ground, maybe one of these awesome gifts will help to stave off the inevitable. One can but hope, right?

Literature and Music

1. You’re an Animal, Viskovitz! is a charming (and funny, and kinda dirty) collection of short stories. Written by a scientist, it follows the adventures of the hapless Viskovitz, who finds himself inhabiting the body of a different species of animal in every chapter. The drive to reproduce, plus the specific biological realities of the creature he’s in at that moment, dictate his actions and the events that unfold.

“We snails, Visko,” my old ones explained to me, “are insufficient hermaphrodites—”
“How disgusting!” I shrieked. “Even our family?”
“Certainly, sonny. We are able to fulfill both the masculine function as well as the feminine one. There’s nothing to be ashamed of.” With his radula, he pointed to my two tools.
“And how come insufficient?”
“Because we can couple only with other snails, if there is a reciprocal inclination, but never with ourselves.”
“Says who?”
“Our faith, Visko. The other nasty thing is a mortal sin. Even to think of it,” Daddymommy warned.

2. The journal Isotope is a very rare breed—a publication dedicated to printing long-form literary essays, fiction, and poetry on topics relating to science and nature, including “astronomy, artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, sexuality, urban ecosystems, restoration ecology, physics and math.” It’s smart, engaging stuff, and I can’t recommend a subscription highly enough for anyone who is interested in both literary and scientific explorations.

3. Eerie-voiced Emilíana Torrini Davíðsdóttir (What? Not all Icelandic singer-songwriters have easy-to-pronounce names) knew what she was doing when she named an album Love in The Time of Science: it really pushed up her nerd appeal. The LP may not actually have all that much to do with science, per se, but its title track does start with the beguiling and persuasive lines, “Thinnnnnnnk of me/ Very scientifically...”

Historical Artifacts

4. Hey, is there a kitchen wall in your partner’s apartment that’s just crying out for some sophisticated, science-related art? Have I got the thing for you! How about a great big poster of pioneering sexologist Alfred Kinsey interviewing a female subject? Everyone in the photo is fully clothed, more’s the pity, but still. It’s a little piece of sex history!

5. This vintage sex-ed book from 1963 is described as follows by its seller: “Featuring many illustrations and photographs, there are hilarious chapter titles such as What about those sex problems? and What’s the harm in petting? (Do you have to pet to be popular?)” HOW CAN YOU RESIST?

Adornments

6. I know, I know. It’s a pain seeing someone else wearing the same Threadless t-shirt as you, because those things are everywhere. But honestly, there’s a reason everyone likes them.

7. It’s an XKCD tie. Unisex, of course. Instant geek-cred.

8. Warning: If you’re the kind of person who can’t look at an anatomically-correct human heart-shaped pendant without wanting to own it, you might not want to follow that link, because these suckers aren’t exactly cheap. Still, neither is your love, right?

Cute and Educational. Or Maybe Just Educational.

9. This poster is pitched at parents who want to grow themselves a baby physicist right quick, but who is ever too old for elephants and Newton’s three laws of motion? No one. That’s who.

10. Disclaimer: I found this item on a list someone made of worst gift ideas. What is it, you ask? Oh, just an owl pellet you can take apart and investigate for the remains of small rodents. Come on. Prove me right. Buy your true love some regurgitated owl puke for Valentine’s Day.

+1

11. Because Spinal Tap taught us all that going to eleven is totally worth it, here’s a little extra. It’s my favorite t-shirt from Inkling’s very own store, and it says Scientists are Foxy. Rooowr. (It comes in four other colors if pink’s not your style.)

Well, that’s it. Happy Breakup Day, y’all.

Crescat Graffiti, Vita Excolatur

Quinn Dombrowski — 2010-02-03T14:07:01-06:00

The graffiti preserved in Pompeii after the eruption of Mount Vesuvius provided unique insights into Roman street life. The Mayan graffiti found in Tekal and the graffiti left by Vikings also give us small glimpses into the past. What kind of insight might a longitudinal study of the graffiti on the walls at the University of Chicago’s main library provide into the lives and minds of this community of college students?

Since September 27, 2007, I have been documenting the graffiti left in public study areas in the Joseph Regenstein Library ("the Reg"): the study nooks tucked into the stacks, the whiteboards in the all-night study space, and the study carrels in the reading rooms. I have transcribed over 620 “pieces” of graffiti—many of which contain more than one single contribution—and over 410 of them are datable to within a week of their creation. The following is an analysis of the data to date; you can access the entire data set at my website, Crescat Graffiti, Vita Excolatur.

Happiness
One possible metric for measuring happiness is the classic “smiley face” and its negative counterpart, the “frowny face”. On these grounds, students lean markedly towards happiness, with over 63% smiley faces. (See fig. 1.) A superficial look at the textual data suggests an even stronger case for an assessment of happiness, with 10 occurrences of “happy” vs. 3 occurrences of “sad”.

This must be tempered by the fact that 70% of the uses of the word “happy” are in the phrase “be happy”—suggesting happiness is a currently-unrealized state. Subsequent points of analysis also raise doubts about the possibility of an unqualified assertion of happiness.

Love vs. Hate
Love and hate, both classic graffiti themes, appear often in the Reg. The difference in their frequency once again suggests that U of C students do more loving than hating: “love” (or a heart-shaped drawing used in lieu of the verb) appears almost 6 times as often as “hate”.

The objects of student love vary widely, with “Puerto Rico,” “this silence,” “Tiramisu,” and other miscellanea appearing alongside the usual references to people, school, and life in general.

Hatred, in contrast, is directed exclusively towards people, academic subjects, finals week, and oneself. The feelings of the student body are not always unanimous, as a number of items appear as the object of both love and hate. (See fig. 2.)

Sex
“Fuck” is one of the most frequently used words in the corpus of graffiti. “Suck” and “ass(hole)” are also well-represented. However, a close examination of context shows that the sexual usage of these terms amounts to a mere 19% for fuck, 22% for suck, and 20% for ass(hole).

“Suck” is overwhelmingly used as a synonym for “bad," whereas the non-sexual meanings of “fuck” include use as an intensifier—“fucking,” “the fuck”—a dismissive phrase—“fuck this place”—indicating trouble ("fucked", “fucked up"), and as a generic synonym for person: “keep it up, you lonely fuck.” In addition to the common use of “ass(hole)” as a derogatory term for others, “ass” is found almost as frequently as an intensifier (“ugly-ass” and in idioms referring to heads/sticks up one’s ass. (See fig. 3.)

Even an examination of the word “sex” yields mixed results. Out of four pieces of graffiti that use the word, only “sex in the morning, sex all day!!!” is clearly very sexual; less clear are a suggestion that one use condoms for safe sex, the phrase “for sex in the stacks, look up” (with nothing there to be seen) and the philosophical question “Is sex with a zombie necrophilia?”

Anatomy
Penises overwhelmingly dominate in both pictorial and textual representations of anatomy. There are no drawings of vaginas whatsoever, and only 5 drawings of breasts compared to 9 drawings of penises (See fig. 4.) Textually, there are four references to female anatomy (predominately rendered as “boobs.” In contrast, there are 17 penis references, mostly split between “penis” and “dick,” with two uses of “cock” and one of “dong.”

Temporal fluctuations
The prevalence of graffiti referring to love, despair, and sex varies depending on the time of year, in rather surprising ways. Love peaks in October—right as the school year starts—and remains at that high level through November, when despair also peaks (around the time of fall quarter midterms). After November, both love and despair graffiti drop off significantly until spring. Love peaks again in April (beginning of spring quarter) before falling off in May, when despair has its second peak.

Entirely separate from love graffiti, sex graffiti reaches its one and only peak in December, before declining for the rest of the school year. (See fig. 5.) Perhaps students also “get lucky” in the summer— but if so, the luckiest part is that they’re not in the library to write about it.

Women’s Fliberation

Tania Rabesandratana — 2010-01-28T01:02:00-06:00

Big pharma claims to hold the chemical key to a vigorous female libido. It’s called Flibanserin and you pop it to get randy. Inkling writer Tania Rabesandratana investigates to find out whether it’s indeed that simple.

Serendipitous drug development makes for a good story. It makes science sound surprising while making the pharmaceutical industry look spontaneous and candid. Remember how Pfizer was originally looking for a compound against hypertension, and ended up marketing Viagra?

In the (not-yet-so-naughty) noughties, global pharmaceutical firm Boehringer-Ingelheim tested Flibanserin as an anti-depressant. The drug didn’t work against depression, but to everyone’s surprise it boosted the ever-mysterious female libido. Cyrine Ben Amor, a psychiatrist and medical projects leader at the pharmaceutical company’s offices in Paris, recalls: “This came as a surprise, since other anti-depressants can cause negative sexual side-effects.” So development shifted towards libido-boosting, and Ben Amor now insists that Flibanserin is “not an anti-depressant.”

Last November, Boehringer-Ingelheim presented results of self-funded, phase-III clinical trials at a major medical get-together. The pooled studies involved a total of 5,000 pre-menopausal women in long-term relationships. The women on the drug reported, on average, 0.7 more “Satisfying Sexual Events” per month vs. those on placebo. Significant, but not mind-blowing.

Defining Dysfunction?

To come up (on purpose) with a libido drug, one must understand how desire works in the first place. But desire is often elusive and always entwined in cultural, social, hormonal, and psychological factors. “There are so many reasons for not wanting sex,” explains Dr. Petra, London-based psychologist extraordinaire and infamous sex-advice guru. “You’re not getting on well with your partner, you’re tired or ill, you just had a baby, life’s getting in the way…”

Boehringer-Ingelheim claims Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder (HSDD) is a real, frequent, serious condition that causes great distress in women. Others, such as the grassroots organization New View Campaign believe that the HSDD-hype is simply disease-mongering, orchestrated by the pharmaceutical industry to make us ladies feel inadequate and buy more drugs.

“In order to name a dysfunction, you need to define function. But there is no such thing as normal sexual function,” notes Liz Canner, director of Orgasm Inc., a documentary film about the over-medicalization of sex.

We don’t know how Flibanserin works, exactly, only that it modulates several neurotransmitters—mostly serotonin, and to a lesser extent dopamine and norepinephrine. Ben Amor says the medication “lowers inhibitory factors and increases stimulatory factors.” But as the British neuroscientist and blogger Neuroskeptic pointed out, it is also a sedative.

Doesn’t that sound like what a glass of wine does? “That would be an environmental factor,” replies Ben Amor, whilst Flibanserin is meant to act on internal factors on a durable basis.

Dr. Petra would like to see Flibanserin pitted against precisely such “environmental factors.” “Why not test the drug not only vs. placebo, but also vs. using a sex toy or lubricant, communicating better with your partner, having a glass of wine, or going to sex education sessions?” she suggests.

Long-Term Romance

Unlike Viagra, Flibanserin is effective only after several weeks of daily pill-popping. Again, filmmaker Liz Canner is critical: “Pharmaceutical companies want drugs you take every single day, because they mean a higher profit.”

Sylvain Mimoun, head of the Psychosomatic Gynaecology and Human Sexuality Unit at the Robert Debré Hospital in Paris, thinks this suits women just fine, because “they want to feel better generally, without having to schedule sex.” Does that mean patients would have to be on the medication forever?! Mimoun doesn’t think so. “If a patient sprained her ankle… I’d say to her: ‘I can help you walk again,’ and for this I’d need a crutch,” he explains. That crutch could be Flibanserin, which might help break a vicious circle or reduce irritability and low self-esteem.

Ben Amor agrees, but when I ask about what happens when the drug is withdrawn, she contradicts herself. “Patients who had benefited from an increase in sexual desire after 24 weeks on Flibanserin had no withdrawal symptoms during another 24 weeks on placebo,“ she tells me. That’s good. But then she admits that “after 48 weeks in total, the effects on sexual function decreased too.” That’s not too good: some women could feel they can’t be turned on without their “chemical crutch.”

Besides increased desire, the drug can produce dizziness, somnolence, or nausea. These side effects affected a significant but reasonably low percentage of patients, and went away after a few weeks of treatment. At Boehringer-Ingelheim, Ben Amor says she was “pleasantly surprised” to see that “the product is exceptionally safe.” But we don’t really know the long-term outlook.

The Big Picture Behind the Little Pink Pill

At the end of the day, no data set can tell us if Flibanserin is good news or not. Mimoun and Ben Amor believe any pharmaceutical tool that can help women overcome an upsetting situation is positive. The industry congratulates itself for shedding light on an overlooked topic—a taboo, even!

But Dr Petra warns: “Lots of women are made to believe that they should want it all the time,” and this generates a potentially huge market to tap into. “I would like the drug to not be the first port of call, and not to distract from other potential approaches,” she continues.

Boehringer-Ingelheim is awaiting the decisions of the FDA and the European Medicines Agency (EMEA), which will determine if Flibanserin can be launched on the prescription market. Meanwhile, the corporate communications guns are out already. Flibanserin’s press pack comes in pretty lilac tones with matching websites about “The Science of Desire,” walking a fine line between providing “much-needed training” for doctors or patients, and fabricating a problem in the same breath that it offers the magic fix.

There’s no doubt that a storm of Flibanserin hype is on the horizon. When it hits, remember: whether they’re helped along by pills or pillow talk, in the final analysis our sex lives are deeply personal—not pharmaceutical.

Book Club: The Happiness Project

Anya Weber — 2010-01-19T19:21:00-06:00

Happiness keeps you from dying from a lot of terrible things. Ain’t I a happy broad?
—Phyllis Diller, age 92, quoted in The New Yorker, Jan. 11, 2010

Happiness, by its nature, is fleeting—and it’s supposed to be. “Happiness is a noun, so we think it’s something we can own,” says psychologist Daniel Gilbert. “But happiness is a place to visit, not a place to live.” In a 2007 article, Gilbert explains that our emotions are a compass, cueing us to potential benefits and risks of our actions. “What good is a compass if it’s always stuck on north?” Gilbert asks.

In her new book, The Happiness Project, Gretchen Rubin undertakes a life-tweaking mission: to create a set of rules and behaviors that will increase her daily happiness. She’s not trying to stick her emotional compass permanently on north. Rather, Rubin approaches happiness as a scientist might. Her hypothesis: by creating a set of rules and behaviors to follow, she will be able to measure their impact on her daily moods.

Rubin realizes how fortunate she is. She and her family are financially secure; she has a loving husband and two healthy daughters; she has her dream job (writing); she lives on the Upper East Side in New York City. She’s not depressed. But she often feels cranky, snaps at loved ones, or feels resentful or underappreciated. There’s an undercurrent of discontent beneath the bedrock of her fulfilled existence.

In this book, and on her popular blog, Rubin chronicles her attempt to find a formula for happiness. She reads everything she can find on the topic, from positive-psychology studies to ancient philosophical texts. Based on her research and on sheer gut instinct, she creates dozens of happiness resolutions: for example, “Go to sleep earlier,” “Quit nagging,” and “Ask for help.” She then assigns several resolutions to each month of the upcoming year, and charts her performance using a calendar on which she gives herself a daily ✓ (good) or X (bad). (You can see a sample chart here.)

I was worried that I’d get annoyed reading a well-off woman’s complaints. But the book isn’t like that. Rubin’s voice, while slightly neurotic and driven, is also likeable. She gently mocks herself for her super-analytical approach to happiness, and for getting evangelical with the people around her. (At one point, having felt a tremendous burst of energy from cleaning her own closets, she starts pushing her clutter-clearing talents onto not-so-willing friends.)

Rubin also takes happiness seriously—and that takes courage. As she writes: “Of course, it’s cooler not to be too happy. There’s a goofiness to happiness…irony and world-weariness allow people a level of detachment from their choices.” Trading coolness for happiness is an admirable choice.

Two components of the book weaken its appeal. First, Rubin doesn’t seem to have decided whether this is science for laypeople, or a lighthearted memoir. The phrases “studies show” and “research shows” appear a lot—but with no indication of what studies and what research. For example, Rubin tells her husband, “[I]n a 2006 study, eighty-four percent of Americans ranked themselves as ‘very happy’ or ‘pretty happy.’” But there’s no footnote showing the study she’s referencing, and she writes the scene as conversational dialogue, blurring the lines between memoir and science writing. There is a suggested reading list in the back of the book—but it’s difficult to connect claims in the text to specific studies.

Some references actually weaken Rubin’s arguments. “Research shows that regularly having fun is a key factor in having a happy life; people who have fun are twenty times as likely to feel happy,” she writes, but again, there’s no way to trace what she’s referring to. Rubin is actually making a subtle point here about the difference between fun and happiness—but I wanted her to do a better job of unpacking the research she cites. How exactly did anyone conclude scientifically that fun leads to happiness?

A bigger problem is that Rubin includes comments from readers of her blog, which she created while researching the book. This is, in many ways, a book built from a blog (a “blook”?), and that creates two pitfalls. First, it feels as if we’re listening in on a book-club discussion before the book’s even been finished. And, her readers’ comments make Rubin sound less confident. She has plenty to offer without incorporating other (mostly weaker) voices.

But these flaws don’t seriously compromise The Happiness Project. It’s a fast, fun read, surprisingly touching in places. Rubin mentions that she’s trying to store up happiness now, so that she’ll be better prepared if disaster strikes in the future. (Though she doesn’t mention it, there is some psychological basis for this notion.)

In the end, Rubin’s scientific approach—charting her own behaviors and seeing how they make her feel—might be what’s most useful to anyone trying to bump up their own happiness levels.

Q&A: Phillip Chee

Meera Lee Sethi — 2010-01-12T20:04:00-06:00

For the past four years, Phillip Chee has been documenting what is perhaps the oldest and most mysterious object of human interest: the sky. Already a trained biologist and philosopher and a working computer scientist, Phillip has also become an accomplished self-taught astrophotographer, meaning he uses the tools of photography to capture such celestial objects as constellations, planets, galaxies, aurora, meteors, comets, nebulae and star clusters.

I’ve been watching Phillip’s body of work grow (and grow more gorgeous) for a couple of years now, and had the distinct pleasure of asking him about the science and art behind it recently.

You’re a self-described “Computer Science Geek.” What’s your day job? When did you also become an astrophotography geek, and how did it happen?

I’m a computer science technologist at Sir Sandford Fleming College in Peterborough, Ontario. I spend a great deal of my time with computers, networks, software installation and configurations, and I also teach web site design. I became an astrophotography geek through sheer serendipity. There were two moments that led to it, really. The first was a project organized in January 2006 by an online photography community I belong to called Utata. The theme of the project was night photography, and because I’d always had a passion for astronomy (I even considered becoming an astronomer when I was in high school!), I chose the astrophotography category for my project images. Then in early 2007, I took the plunge for good when I bought an intervalometer (a remote shutter release that can be programmed to take multiple timed photos) for my camera. But really, the “ah-ha!” moment came when I was dropping off my daughter at a Girl Guide meeting. Venus was prominent in the twilight sky in early 2007 and it seemed to beckon me to enter the realm of all things astrophotography.

Can you tell us about the basic setup you use and what a night’s work is like?

My astrophotography is mainly wide-field (meaning you don’t need a telescopic lens), because this is the easiest to start with. I use a Nikon D200 DSLR, a remote timer, a sturdy tripod and a variety of lenses, mainly my Nikkor 10.5mm fisheye. I also shoot on film, and my favourite camera for this is my Nikon F3HP, because it has a setting which allows you to trip the shutter and keep it open indefinitely without requiring you to hold down a shutter release cable. That way you can walk away and use your hands for other things.

Most of the photos I take have exposure times between 30 and 90 seconds long, but it may take over a hundred exposures to create a single image. Because celestial objects move across the sky, my camera has to move with them. I use a tracking platform that permits me to follow any object at the rate of the Earth’s rotational speed. It attaches to my tripod and then I mount the camera to it.

At the end of the night I may have spent two to three hours outdoors with my camera. With the long exposures and intervalometer I can just look up and admire the view, or if I get bored I go inside. Or I may have my iPod Touch and just groove to a great playlist.

Why do you need so many exposures to make an image?

With astrophotography, the key to getting a good image is basically collecting as many photons on the sensor as possible while minimizing noise from long exposures. To do this you have to take a number of images of the same object and stack them together. I stack them all together, then subtract what are called “dark frames.” A dark frame is basically a photo with the lens cap on, taken using the same exposure settings as those you used to create the actual image, or “light frame.” I usually take twice as many dark as light frames, then use a free software program called DeepSky Stacker to stack the images and subtract the dark frames. Finally I bring the resultant file into Photoshop and apply a number of other adjustments.

What’s the most distant celestial object you’ve photographed?

A trio of galaxies in the constellation Leo called the Leo Triplet, about 35 million light-years away.

Which of your photographs was the toughest to produce, and why?

The Leo Triplet. With objects that distant and faint, you really need to collect a lot of photons. Without a constant power supply, digital camera batteries won’t last very long—so you’ll never get enough exposure. To truly get enough data you have to spend many, many hours outside. After that experience and many others I went out and bought a portable battery pack, which is really just a modified car battery with 4 cigarette lighter connectors!

You’ve often photographed the bright star of the International Space Station as it moves over your house, sometimes alongside the space shuttle it’s docked to. You’ve even captured it separating from its shuttle. Me, I would be wondering if all those astronauts up there were looking back at me (even though I know, of course, that it’s ridiculous to think so). What are you thinking about while you watch it?

When I first realized you could see the International Space Station and even photograph it I was like, “Dude, that is so awesome!” But really, I’m jealous. I think, wouldn’t it be so cool to be up there, circling the Earth and seeing the world from that perspective? Even more, I think about the amazing progress we as a species have made with our first steps toward space exploration. I think about the laws of physics and how it is gravity that propels something the size of 3 football fields at 27,000 km/h (17,000 mph).

Once or twice in your years of photographing the sky at night you say you think you may have captured noctilucent clouds. What the heck are noctilucent clouds, and why are they so elusive?

Noctilucent clouds are a strange phenomenon. These are very high altitude, tendril-shaped clouds made from water-ice, hovering at 76-85km in altitude. They’re observed during the summer months at latitudes between 50° and 70° above and below the equator. What makes them interesting is that they can only be seen in deep twilight, when the light from the sun below the horizon illuminates them. They appear to have an electric-blue glow. Another interesting fact about them is that they were not observed before 1885 and some scientist theorize that the eruption of the Krakatoa Volcano in 1883 may have precipitated their existence. What’s remarkable is that they are appearing much more frequently now because of global climate change and are sometimes visible at lower latitudes. That’s why I sometimes wonder if I’m seeing them in my photos, because I live just above the 45° latitude line.

Something else you’ve tried to capture is a phenomenon known as Zodiacal light. What’s that? And how did you eventually track it down?

The zodiacal light is a diffuse cone of light visible in the West after sunset and before sunrise in the East, the best times being spring in the West and fall in the East. You need a remarkably dark sky to see it with the naked eye but a camera can pick it out in relatively dark rural skies. What it is is reflected sunlight from the dust particles left over from planet formation 4.6 billion years ago in the inner solar system. I’ve been intrigued by it since I was a kid, and once I understood the definition of twilight, I managed to get some nice photos of it by timing the moment with clear skies and no moonlight. Brian May, the guitarist from Queen, earned his Ph.D in astrophysics in 2007 with a thesis studying the velocities of particles in the zodiacal dust. It took him over 30 years to do it but nonetheless it makes that particular astronomical phenomenon even more sexy in my book!

Something that surprised me was that you don’t always shoot at night. What’s the story with your “analemma” photographs of the sun?

One of the most interesting aspects of studying the sky is that you will notice the paths of solar system objects vary over time, often in a regular fashion. This is because as the Earth revolves around the sun it also spins on a tilted axis of 23°, which, by no accident, matches the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn. This tilt causes a visual illusion: the sun appears in a different position of the sky at the same time each day, say at noon. Over time, in any 365 day period, the sun will appear to trace a closed path in a figure-eight pattern. When you photograph the sun this way from the same spot on Earth and superimpose each image you will see a pattern known as an analemma. The shape of the analemma will vary depending on your latitude and typically looks like a flattened bowling pin!

What exactly are we seeing in this photo below? It’s amazing.

Everybody seems to love star trails and this is a good example of that. To make this photo, I took 114 thirty-second exposures, and then layered them together. You can tell it was taken in the northern hemisphere because all the star trails appear to circle around a fixed point. That fixed point is the North Star, also known as Polaris, the last star in the handle of the Little Dipper. What does this mean? Ironically, it provides evidence that the Universe revolves around the Earth! In the middle, you can also see the path traced by the International Space Station.

In urban areas, light pollution is a huge problem at night—I can’t remember the last time I saw more than one or two stars. What’s it like where you live? And are there any camera tricks that can help city-dwelling astrophotographers cut through the glow?

I live in a smallish city of about 90,000, located 90 minutes from Toronto. Comparatively the sky here is darker than in Toronto, but not by much. I can only see the Milky Way with a camera and even that requires a lot of post-processing to enhance. But, just 20 minutes drive away from town affords dark enough skies that the Milky Way becomes naked-eye visible. That said, I have been able to image the Andromeda Galaxy from my backyard in the city even though it is almost impossible to see with the naked eye there. To reduce the glow of light pollution, I use a filter designed to cut off light wavelengths from mercury, neon and sodium street lights.

One other thing that budding astrophotographers need to be aware of is that DSLRs have an infrared-blocking filter over the sensor. It prevents you from imaging any object that emits a lot of hydrogen gas, like many nebulae. So if you’re trying to photograph something and it’s not showing up, that might be why. (This is not a problem with film cameras.) You can fix this by removing the IR filter and there are a few companies that specialize in the removal or modification of your camera for this purpose.

When do you sleep?

Sleep? What’s that?

Lessons from the Sea Squirt

Meera Lee Sethi — 2010-01-09T17:44:00-06:00

The sea squirt is a squishy-looking, unprepossessing marine animal that somewhat resembles a hot water bottle with two nozzles. Cilia (hair-like structures) at the opening of one nozzle sweep salty water into the creature’s body. Inside, the water is mined for oxygen and nutrients before being vigorously ejected through the other opening. Such minor explosions of waste matter give the sea squirt its picayune name. Occasionally, a sea squirt releases eggs and sperm—its ability to produce both male and female gametes being the singular happiness of the hermaphrodite. These free-floating future-capsules wander about until they find the sperm or eggs of other sea squirts, enabling them to fertilize themselves into tadpole-like sea squirt spawn that will grow up to be shaped like hot water bottles.

It all seems, on the whole, a simple existence. But wisdom emerges from the strangest of places. Could the sea squirt be your new guru?

Us and Them

Although they certainly don’t look anything like us, sea squirts actually have quite a bit more in common with human beings than they do with, say, corals. They belong to the same phylum as Homo sapiens: Chordata. And they fit there because, although they don’t have a backbone (most other chordates are vertebrates, like us), their larval babies do have a notochord. A notochord is a sort of flexible rod made of cartilage that runs down the back and serves as a sheath for a small number of nerve fibers—it’s worth noting that as embryos, humans, too, go through a stage where a notochord is the only spinal cord we have. The sea squirt’s notochord is part of a primitive nervous system that allows it, in its larval stage, to respond to the presence of light and navigate using that information.

Effective navigating is important partly because the larval sea squirts have to nose around in the water for nutrients as they grow, but also because they are looking for something else: a permanent home. In their adult form, sea squirts are sessile organisms. The term comes from the Latin for “seated,” and refers to the fact that once they’ve found what looks like a good place to be, sessile organisms figure they’re done with moving, thank you very much, and sit there until they expire. In the case of sea squirts, good places to be are usually rocks, cement breakwaters, the hulls of ships, or sea shells or crabs that are large enough to accommodate their bodies.

If You Don’t Need it, Lose It

Having located its sweet spot, the larval sea squirt attaches itself to the chosen surface with a sucker and begins to metamorphose. Where it once had gills, it develops the entry and exit nozzles that help it to eat. Its twitching tail disappears. And—since it no longer needs to move or find food, which will forevermore be brought to it on the currents of the sea—part of the sea squirt’s metamorphosis involves merrily absorbing its tail and notochord, including those primitive nerve fibers. As it does so, it achieves its final form and receives an additional burst of energy into the bargain.

Researchers and journalists alike are fond of using the sea squirt as a metaphor for intellectual laziness in humans. “When it no longer needs to think,” they chuckle, “it eats its own brain!” “Use it or lose it!” they caution happily. There’s certainly something to be learned from the sea squirt’s unusual life cycle, but let’s be fair: 1) a notochord is hardly a brain, and 2) what the sea squirt is doing isn’t really self-cannibalism. We wouldn’t, after all, think to describe a frog as having eaten its earlier incarnation, the tadpole. If you ask me, what’s really interesting about these odd little creatures is not how lazy they are, but—like so many species in nature—how wonderfully pragmatic. How many of us have held on to a faded idea of who we really are, long past the point at which we ceased to be that person in reality? Who among us hasn’t tried without really thinking to force ourselves into a shape, or a personality, or a career, that just no longer fits? No more! Think of the sea squirt.

Don’t Put All Your Eggs in One ~~Basket~~ Bud

The fact that sea squirts absorb their notochords once they become defunct is just one example of their no-nonsense nature. Just as fascinating is the way they reproduce asexually. For many species of sea squirt, tossing out eggs and sperm into the water isn’t an efficient enough means of multiplying. Their repertoire includes a process called budding, which enables them to rapidly form colonies of sea squirts. In order to bud, a mature sea squirt forms dozens of tiny outgrowths on its own body that each contain a self-sufficient collection of stem cells. These multiply through mitosis. Eventually, the cells inside a bud organize themselves into a hollow sphere, create a thicker layer of cells on the outside of that sphere, and form chambers and organs within it: a process that takes about two weeks. At the end, voila! A new sea squirt emerges called a “zooid,” genetically identical to the first.

But not every bud makes the cut. According to a recent study of the sea squirt species Botrylloides leachi published by Israeli researcher Yuval Rinkevich, “only the fastest developing bud in a fragment reached the final zooid stage; the others were absorbed into the colony.” Rinkevich calls this a “race for predominance;” I call it an analogy for the kind of growth lots of us go through as we search for the perfect incarnation of ourselves. Why not try a dozen different versions of yourself before keeping the one that seems the strongest, the wisest, the most suited to where you are in your life right then?

If there’s something to be learned from the sea squirt, maybe it’s the call to take stock of where you are, what you want, and what you need to get it now. And then, if there happens to be a tail or a cartigilanous skeletal rod or an underdeveloped bud lying around that you don’t need, why, sea squirt-like, simply stop devoting any more of yourself. Let it melt away. Regain some energy—and use it to grow new, more relevant, and stronger parts. If not all of them survive, that’s okay. The ones that matter will.

At any rate (most likely) you won’t end up looking like a hot water bottle.

Prosthetic Memory: A Camera That Gives Back Lost Moments

Meera Lee Sethi — 2009-12-28T20:33:01-06:00

Anyone who has spent time playing the photographer at a family event can affirm how a camera carves up scenes, altering the memories we hold of them from then on. A human photographer, of course, is not a passive observer: Before we click, we calculate, choosing important moments and composing them just so. What would happen if we relinquished those calculations to someone—or something—else?

Someone to Watch Over Me

In the late 1990s, the Microsoft Research Group in Cambridge, U.K., began developing a simple digital camera designed to take over just that job. The camera is diminutive enough to nestle comfortably in the palm of the hand and light enough to be worn on a thin cord around the neck. It can be programmed to take a picture at regular intervals, such as once every 30 seconds—and it can do something a little more subtle. Built-in sensors keep constant tabs on surrounding levels of light intensity and color, the wearer’s body temperature, and his or her movements and acceleration; small changes in any of these conditions can be set to trigger an automatic shutter release. The camera is alert for those moments that are likely to be significant, making it ready to capture the joyful approach of someone whose face makes the heart race, the blood boil—ready for the first glimpse of what lies beyond a just-opened door.

Since the camera has no viewfinder or display, its wearer cannot choose which scenes it records or dictate their composition. It is not a tool; it is more akin to a witness. By the end of the day, hundreds of low-resolution images have been taken, collecting the arc of the wearer’s experiences in a series of odd, unpredictable splinters that can be viewed on a computer as still images or patched together into a twitchy little film. Microsoft calls their project the SenseCam; I’d say it’s the ultimate antidote for an unobserved life.

The creators of the SenseCam meant to devise a sort of memory prosthesis, an external aid that does its best to mimic a person’s own ability to recall experiences. In order to match the viewpoint in the photos as closely as possible to a first-person perspective, Microsoft fitted the camera with a wide-angle lens and recommends that wearers position it at chest-height. You might think of it as a perfected version of human memory. The camera’s testimony, unlike that of a human mind, is impartial, infallible, and everlasting. Yet the images the camera forms are also random and incomplete. And although they seek to mimic a first-person perspective, they do not duplicate it.

Over the past ten years, the SenseCam has played a leading role in several studies conducted by clinicians, psychiatrists, and sociologists. Reading these reports, an odd truth emerges: The camera is at its most fascinating when its record diverges, either in tone or substance, from that of its user.

La Vie Quotidienne

In 2007, British researchers trained six citizens from South Wales in the use of the SenseCam and its software, and sent them off for one week to see what they could see. The researchers’ findings, published in the proceedings of the 2007 International Conference on Human Computer Interaction, are among the most charming and philosophical scientific results you may ever read.

The paper discusses a number of common threads in the study-subjects’ experiences as they viewed images captured over the course of the week. Not surprisingly, many reported that they were taken off guard by the sight of features in their lives that had seemed unimportant at the time: the way the road rolled steadily on as their bicycle wheels spun below during a commute, the specific gestures a lover used as he talked about his day. The participants found these images moving, perhaps because of the sense that if the SenseCam had not been there, they would have simply drifted softly into silence, like the thrum of a bell.

In the same way, subjects were forced to notice not just the major events of their lives, but those that—by sheer force of repetition—comprised the greatest number of photographs. One participant noted “how much I was in the car… how much you go shopping… how much of your day is taken up by washing up.” The reliable firing of the camera’s shutter, in other words, divided the day into units that could be counted. Its images presented people with an opportunity to measure their lives: this much time spent alone, this much with family, this much working, this much walking, this much sitting, staring, thinking. This is a very different camera from the ones that accompany people to dinners with friends and fly happily through the magnificent streets of foreign cities, pointed at the best moments of our lives.

The scientists noted two other SenseCam-related experiences that seem closely connected: First, subjects frequently described how the images rendered the details of their own lives “strange” to them, as if they had each been the lonely and fascinating protagonist of a silent film. Second, they discovered a heightened awareness of the lives of others. Having looked at their experiences from a disembodied perspective, people began longing to enter the experiences of other bodies. They became inclined to fasten their SenseCams to kites, so that they could enter the world of flight; dogs, so that they could discover the world as other creatures lived it; they offered their cameras to friends and neighbors, wanting to become—if only temporarily—someone other than themselves.

Memory-Maker

In 2004, a 63-year old woman named by her doctors “Mrs. B.” became the first person to use the SenseCam as a memory rehabilitation aid. Two years previously, Mrs. B. had suffered an acute episode of limbic encephalitis: an inflammation of the brain caused by the onset of a viral infection. Although she made a full physical recovery from the infection, the lesions Mrs. B. sustained in her hippocampal lobes caused her to experience marked anteretrograde memory impairment: an inability to construct lasting memories of events that happened after the illness. The neuropsychologists who were treating Mrs. B. hoped that, with the help of her husband, she would be able to use the SenseCam to form and retain memories of significant events in her life.

They were right.

Without the SenseCam, Mrs. B. could only remember events—no matter how interesting or unusual—for a few days at a time before their outlines would become diffuse. Writing down what had happened, and then rereading her own descriptions, enabled Mrs. B to recall some portion of the events for up to two weeks—but then they, too, would slip from her mind like sand. The SenseCam, on the other hand, dramatically intensified both the clarity and persistence of Mrs. B.’s memories.

Here’s what Mrs. B.’s physicians had her do. She would wear the camera around her neck on days when she and her husband agreed that an event was about to take place that was worth remembering—a trip to a new town or a visit with friends. She would then review the images it took on that day, discuss them with her husband, and return to them several times over the course of a two week period. This process resulted in an astonishing improvement in her long-term recall of autobiographical events.

By astonishing, I mean this: three months after her last viewing of any given set of SenseCam images, Mrs. B. could, on average, recall more than 75 percent of the items on a predetermined list of details about the events they depicted. She had gone from being a functional amnesiac to being someone whose memory, though faulty, was comparatively rich and reliable. And she had done it by combining her own limited recall with that of a tiny automatic camera.

The authors of the paper in which Mrs. B.’s case study is described refer to the Sensecam as “aiding,” or “improving,” her autobiographical memory, arguing that it “cues and consolidates” her own impressions. They consider it a helpful little sidekick for her brain, compensating for what she lacks.

Perhaps. But consider this final study. College-aged subjects were asked to work at remembering three childhood events: two that their parents reported had actually happened to them at school, and one that had not. Subjects who were shown a class photo (also helpfully provided by their parents) from the year in which the invented event supposedly took place were dramatically more likely to report that they remembered it happening quite vividly.

Merely showing people an old photograph, in other words—even though the image itself depicted something entirely different—made it far easier for researchers to implant false memories. If Mrs. B. pores over her SenseCam photos with her husband over and over, where, truly, are the memories she now makes coming from? It may not matter much, in practical terms; Mr. B. reports that his wife’s quality of life has improved significantly since she started wearing half her memory around her neck, and that they are able to share experiences in a way that they could not before. That is probably the most important thing.

Still, when you think about the power of the observer to change the observed, it’s hard not to wonder about the strange and unexpected ways in which this tiny little camera might be changing the lives of those who carry it.

Slippery Negotiations in a Banana Republic

Dan Strain — 2009-12-19T00:25:00-06:00

If apes could negotiate, some well-known movies might have had different endings: King Kong would have lasted longer than a New York minute; the warring tribes in 2001 might have tried UN arbitration before braining each other with gazelle femurs; and Bonzo could have argued for a later bedtime. This insight comes courtesy of a recent study that shines a light on the hidden origins of human cooperative behavior.

Group decision making in humans is a complex balancing act of selfishness and altruism. In the economic ultimatum game, for instance, often used in behavioral economics experiments, one subject gets a wad of cash that he can split with a partner in any way he wants. The catch? If the partner tells him what he can—ahem—do with the offer, they’ll both get nothing. Humans use social cues and our ever-sophisticated communication skills to solve these dilemmas. In many cases, face-to-face subjects cooperate more than anonymous partners in similar experiments.

To tease out the evolutionary origins of human cooperation or the frequent lack thereof, scientists often turn to our cousins. No, not the ones you see once a year and avoid talking about politics with—chimpanzees. “Since chimpanzees are our closest relatives, they are the obvious starting point to investigate differences in cooperative behavior between humans and animals,” says ecologist Larissa Conradt of the University of Sussex, United Kingdom, a scientist who studies group decision-making.

One such investigation has come from researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. They showed that chimpanzees could set aside conflicting interests and cooperate to win rewards: also known as bananas. In many cases, Machiavellian chimps with low social status even subtly coaxed their higher-ranking rivals to split the takings evenly, according to the study published in the November 2009 issue of the journal Evolution and Human Behavior. What’s most surprising is that they did all this without communicating vocally, suggesting that basic negotiation skills may have evolved long before humans gained the gift for gab.

Past studies have shown that chimpanzees vocally communicate to form alliances in fights against rivals, but resource haggling—as in the ultimatum game—may require a different set of communication skills, says Alicia Melis, the study lead.

To study primate negotiation behavior, Melis and her team paired six dominant chimpanzees with six subordinates on a sanctuary in Uganda. They gave the chimps two options, a food tray with two plates topped with equal portions of bananas, or another tray in which the portions favored one ape at the other’s expense. They kept the trays in alcoves too deep for grubby ape paws to reach. Both chimps had to pull on ropes together to fetch one of the trays. Dominants had first access to the room and “offered” a tray by sitting next to a rope. Subordinates then either accepted that offer and helped to pull the tray in or held out for more by sitting stubbornly next to the second.

The negotiations didn’t break down into fist-fights or tears the way squabbles over toys, borders or the rules of Risk do in the human world, and the apes eventually worked together in most trials. The dominant chimps preferred the unequal tray, but the subordinates accepted these initial offers less than half of the time. Like an 80s movies about nerds in college, the subordinate chimps even cleverly convinced their jock rivals to help them pull in the equal tray on several occasions.

“A lot of times, individuals with less power had more leverage and were able to convince dominant partners to go with the better deal,” Melis said.

What surprised Melis most is that the chimps largely resolved their disagreements in silence. They kept a watchful eye on each other during the trials, perhaps trying to judge how long a rival could hold out before giving in to a banana craving. But they almost never called or gestured to each other, Melis explains.

“They never really tried to do anything to directly influence the behavior of their partner,” she says.

The lack of overt communication during the trials suggests that basic negotiation patterns evolved in a common ancestor of humans and chimps, long before complex language arose in primates, according to Melis. “You can already do a lot without any of these sophisticated human skills,” she said.

Unlike humans, subordinate apes don’t punish dominant bullies for their greed by refusing to cooperate, Melis says. But to what extent the chimps actually understood that the shoddy deal was their partner’s fault remains unclear.

“This paper demonstrates that chimpanzees can cooperate in a fairly sophisticated manner,” muses Conradt. “This opens many questions, and suggests that we have not yet started to even nearly understand the cooperative behavior of our closest relatives.”

The moral is, if King Kong has Fay Wray and/or Naomi Watts, save everybody a big mess and try to talk him down. You could even offer bananas. A lot of bananas.

The Ecological Consequences of Vampirism

Isla Myers-Smith — 2009-11-30T19:51:00-06:00

One thing seriously overlooked by the current hype around the release of New Moon, the latest movie based on the Twilight series of books, is the ecological consequences of the vampire lifestyle, which, in a word, are considerable. Vampires are not green; they’re wan. And here’s why.

1. THE ECOLOGICAL FOOTPRINT OF A VAMPIRE

The Cullens, the vampire clan with a conscience around whom the books revolve, lead a consumerist and excessive existence. Such lifestyle choices are far from consistent with characters who are portrayed as moralistic immortals. They choose to purchase multiple vehicles: Edward’s Volvo, the silver S60R, Rosalie’s BMW M3, Carlisle’s Mercedes S55 AMG, Emmett’s Jeep Wrangler, and Alice’s Porsche 911 Turbo, five pricey vehicles for a family of seven.

The Cullens drive at fuel-inefficient speeds, increasing the family’s carbon footprint enormously. Bella comments on Edward’s dangerous driving in the first Twilight film and is equally terrified in the Porsche chase with Alice in New Moon. When calculated across their endless lives, the ecological cost of vampirism becomes substantial.

The Cullens already have a leg up on being carbon neutral, what with not breathing and emitting any CO2 through respiration—but they squander their carbon neutrality with their fancy cars, fashionable clothes, large house, and their high-octane 24/7 existence.

This is especially glaring since one would think that immortals would be more concerned about climate change, as they will still exist when human future generations experience impacts such as warming climates, sea level rise, and increased pollution. Global change impacts will not only influence where vampires may be able to live in the future, but also in the case of the Cullens, their so-called “vegetarian” food sources.

2. EFFECTS ON THE FOOD CHAIN

This brings us to yet another ecological cost inadequately explored in neither Stephenie Meyer’s books nor the subsequent films. The Cullens are portrayed as softie vampires since they eschew the traditional vampire diet of human blood for that of top predators in the wilds of Washington state, where the stories take place.

Subsisting on a blood diet rich in top predators cannot be sustainable over eternity. Basic population ecology principles require both birth and death in the prey and predator populations. Immortal predators will exact a continuous predation pressure on populations of large mammals along the West Coast. If each Cullen vampire is feeding on 4 – 12 cougars or grizzly bears per year (a conservative estimate based on the novels, I might add), this is a substantial annual harvest.

Meyer does indicate that the Cullens preferentially hunt in areas with an “overpopulation” of wildlife. But the current evidence along the Pacific Northwest is that increased animal sightings and wildlife human interactions—both of which can look like overpopulation—are simply the result of human development near wilderness areas and animal dependence on garbage.

If the Cullens truly wanted to apply the principles of vegetarianism to vampirism, they should get blood meals from invasive species such as European Starlings or stick to black-tailed deer, which are often overly abundant in the Pacific Northwest. Or they could take a page from HBO’s vampire hit series, True Blood, and have vampires sucking up artificial blood.

TO CONCLUDE

When it comes time for you to immerse yourself in the embarrassingly entertaining supernatural world of the Twilight series, and you are forced to pick which team you will side with: “Team Edward” (vampires) or “Team Jacob” (werewolves), consider not only chiseled good looks and impressively sculpted muscles, but the ecological consequences of a vampire lifestyle.

Sheep Poo Paper: Saves Trees, Fertilizes Crops, Revives Dying Epistolary Art

Meera Lee Sethi — 2009-11-25T21:48:00-06:00

It doesn’t get much more environmentally friendly than this—and it definitely doesn’t get more down-to-earth. A small company in Wales, having realized that

a) you can make paper out of pretty much any kind of cellulose fiber,
b) sheep only digest 50% of the cellulose fibers they eat, leaving lots of it in their poo, and
c) there is a lot of sheep poo lying around in rural Wales,

put the numbers together and came up with the obvious: paper made out of sheep poo.

After being boiled, washed, beaten, and blended into a pulp, “traditional paper making techniques” are used to transform what was once mere dung into a wordsmith’s dream. Bonus: the paper-making process produces a useful by-product, a liquid fertilizer that the company distributes to farmers in the area.

You can buy plain paper, bookmarks, postcards, maps of Wales, and even wedding stationery made out of sheep poo from Creative Paper Wales, which will ship its eccentric, but strangely appealing, products all over the world. Perhaps the most ironic item available for sale in their online store is a line of sheep poo air fresheners. It’s not clear how they infuse these with the clean scent of the Welsh countryside, but infuse them they do. Whatever their secret, it’s all great news for those of us who love writing, the environment, and a good cocktail party story.

The News and Events portion of the site is worth a look. Recently, for instance, they announced that an employee had completed a Masters Degree in Law after having handed in all his essays—and his dissertation—on sheep poo paper (it just doesn’t get any less fun to type that). Also, the corporate team behind this genius product is currently working on developing a waterproof, seaworthy sheep poo paper coating (poo floats) for a wooden canoe they built. They hope to paddle all the way from Wales to France on Sheep. Poo. Paper. The project is a fundraising stunt for charity; if you have any spare pennies left over after you stock up on You Know What, you can help out here.

P.S. Keep your eyes on the site: come Christmas time, the company also produces a holiday line of Reindeer Poo paper.

The Secret Life of Bed Bugs

Meera Lee Sethi — 2009-11-18T21:19:00-06:00

Although the urban bed bug Cimex lectularius was once so much a part of people’s lives in this country that a 1905 book of Modern Medicine called it “too well known to require description,” bed bugs made what seemed to be a clean exit from the scene after World War II, thanks to better sanitation and pesticides.

But unless you’ve been under a rock (not, incidentally, a particularly good place to avoid bed bugs, which like to hide in small, dark places) for the past few years, you know these critters are making a serious comeback. A good friend of mine was visiting from New York City some months ago, and people, I nearly put him on the first jet out of Chicago when hours after he arrived he started to scratch thoughtfully at himself, wondering aloud if maybe his apartment was one of the thousands in Manhattan now estimated to be infested by bed bugs every year.

Turns out he was mostly kidding, but ever since I listened to the most disturbing episode of This American Life ever, featuring a family left terrorized by nocturnal persecutors that can balloon from a mere quarter of an inch to three times that size after they feed ON HUMAN BLOOD—I’ve been a little bed bug paranoid. Also, they’re clinging, wingless insects, so it’s not uncommon for them to hitch rides across the country on clothing and luggage.

Enough about their lust for plasma and their savvy travel habits. Let’s talk about bed bug sex. Because Swedish entomologist and pheromone expert Camilla Ryne has just published a new paper adding to a rich store of scientific knowledge about what these diminutive vermin get up to in the sack (so to speak), and I can’t wait to tell you about it.

Here’s what we already knew. First, there is the brutal way male bed bugs inseminate females. The pen may be mightier than the sword, but this is one Romeo who isn’t writing any love letters. Instead, the male bed bug waits until a female has just fed (because only then does she have the energy to produce eggs), mounts her, and pierces into her abdomen with what might as well be a sword. A stabby, seed-bearing sword that will actually leave a scar.

The process, which scientists describe with no attempt at euphemism as “traumatic insemination,” means males can ensure a definitive answer to the niggling “Who’s your daddy?” question. For once the sperm has been injected directly into the female’s bloodstream, it travels through her internal cavity, arrives at her reproductive organs, and fertilizes her eggs. Fortunately for them, females aren’t without a counter-adaptive feature. The spot on their shells where they’re normally pierced has evolved to be thicker (to minimize injury), developed a special notch (to make the insertion easier and more efficient), and lies over a small pocket that collects the sperm handily and allows it to diffuse slowly (reducing the risk of infection from external pathogens and loss of blood from the wound). Researchers have found that these adaptations are terrific at protecting female bed bugs and allowing them to reproduce without too much distress. I find myself cheering on the lady bed bugs...but is their resilience a good thing? Shouldn’t I be rooting for the whole species just to stab each other into oblivion? Nature is so confusing.

This brings me to the second totally wild thing about bed bug sex. Males don’t just go after females with their keen penises. It’s kind of hard for them to tell who’s who, apparently, so if another male has just fed and is all attractively red and engorged looking, they’ll try to stab him, too. Scientists don’t think this is an act of aggression or dominance, although at least one National Geographic video suggests it may be a devious means of making your rival carry your sperm for you. Most researchers have simply concluded that sex is sort of a process of trial and error in the bed bug world. Oh, I see you’ve eaten recently. Let me stab you with my giant penis sword and see if babies result!

This is a rather alarming state of affairs for male bed bugs, because they don’t have the protective adaptations females have, and can be quite severely injured by a mistaken romantic conquest. Evolution, however, is merciful. What Ryne has just shown is that male bed bugs do have a way of shielding themselves from unwanted advances: perfume.

When mounted by another male, a panicked bed bug can release a storm of alarm pheromones that are the chemical equivalent of frantic hand-waving and cries of “Dude. DUDE! Stop harassing me. I ain’t no lady!” Ryne tested her hypothesis by painting over the male pheromone glands, preventing them from kicking up a stink when attacked. This increased the incidence of male-on-male mounting. She also collected the pheromone and spritzed it on male-female couples in the act of love, which had the effect of making the male bed bugs dismount in a hurry.

Ryne says the scent is strong enough that she can detect it herself: a faint, distasteful odor of almonds. This is, incidentally, also how cyanide is supposed to smell. Coincidence? Probably. But if you were being attacked by someone who wanted to bayonet you in the stomach with some sperm, I’d say you couldn’t be blamed for being in a killing mood.

Apparently we’re rather fond of creepy things.

Turning a Blind Eye to Blindness

Meera Lee Sethi — 2009-11-11T00:37:00-06:00

Ursula Mercz was a 56-year-old German seamstress with a history of headaches and vertigo; when she was admitted to the Graz Hospital for Nervous Diseases in November 1894, she had trouble remembering the names of things, and could see only dim outlines of objects in front of her. After a few months, it was obvious she had lost her sight completely; her pupils were unresponsive to light and she could not track movements with her gaze. Yet she categorically denied to attendants at the hospital that she was blind. According to Gabriel Anton, her neurologist, whenever anyone inquired Ursula “stated calmly and clearly that she saw objects that were presented to her...she also claimed to see objects when nothing was presented.” What on earth was going on?

Mercz had a form of anosognosia, a rare and surreal condition in which a patient with a physical defect, even a very severe one, denies that they have any such impairment. Anosognosia can lead patients who are paralyzed on one side of their body to claim, for instance, not just that they can move their immobilized arm, but that they are moving it—right now, can’t you see me? Silly. The version of anosognosia described by Anton, and which came to be known by his name, manifests itself in patients with cortical blindness (blindness caused by damage to the primary visual cortex) and causes them to engage in elaborate visual confabulations.

Although confusion, disorientation, and cognitive impairments have all been observed in patients with Anton’s syndrome, and offer a partial explanation, it has been shown that these factors are not necessarily required in order for the delusion to set in. A patient with no major defects in their intellectual functioning, and who is otherwise essentially aware of the details of their circumstances, may still deny that they are blind. Because their belief that their vision is are normal is so powerful, Anton’s syndrome patients often attempt to navigate without help, stumble into things, and claim that their visual hallucinations are very real. One blind patient, an elderly woman whose doctors “commented favorably on her insight, comprehension, verbal and social skills, and appropriate use of humor,” nonetheless fervently asserted that she had perfectly good vision. Indeed, she believed she was seeing intruders in her room and colorful insects flying into her food.

No one is sure of the precise neurophysiological roots of these delusions. One explanation is that there is a physical disconnect between the part of the brain that processes visual information and the part of the brain that generates a verbal response to what is seen. If the first area could communicate properly with the second, it would report that it had—well—nothing to report. But it can’t. When no report is forthcoming, some neuroscientists believe, the part of the brain in charge of speech and language may be unable to remain silent. Like someone afraid of long pauses in conversations, it makes something up rather than hold its tongue.

Another theory is based on the notion of a false stream of input. This hypothesis holds that what patients think they’re seeing is coming not from their eyes, but from some other part of their brain: the part that maintains a treasury of visual imagery based on past sights. It’s as if, writes neurologist Kenneth Heilman, a TV monitor were receiving scenes coming from a tape or DVD instead of a live television camera.

Whatever the explanation, it’s striking that people with Anton’s syndrome don’t just seem unaware of their blindness; they also seem indifferent to its effects, even when they are pointed out to them. Of Ursula Mercz, Anton wrote in a wondering tone, “The patient was not even aware that there was a reason to be worried or sad about this defect.” In that sense, these patients may not be so different from the rest of us. After all, who hasn’t had at least one friend who seems blissfully oblivious to what seems a painfully obvious truth in his or her life? What Mercz and others like her give us is a profound metaphor for the kind of protective self-deception we all practice to some degree. When life is deficient, it turns out, the brain—for better or for worse—can sometimes do too good a job at making up for it.

We’ve talked at least once before about how the brain mediates vision in fascinating ways.

The Promise and Perils of Brain Massage

Meera Lee Sethi — 2009-10-07T22:15:01-06:00

The annals of science are stuffed full of stories about researchers who were trying to achieve one thing and ended up accomplishing something entirely different. Fortunately for both scientists and science writers, the serendipitous find is a cliché that manages to retain its fascination no matter how many repetitions it goes through. That fascination arises from a fundamental truth about science: the more we think we understand, the more there is to know.

Nowhere is this more true than in the field of neuroscience. Over the past few decades, scientists have made great strides in teasing apart the workings of the brain’s structures on a micro level. We now know, to an astonishing degree of detail, how neuronal cell bodies direct basic functions such as breathing, walking, and other motor functions. We can diagram, model, and even predict how the long, thread-like axons projecting from each brain cell carry electrical impulses from one neuron to another. Yet our fundamental grasp of how the brain’s signals operate on a larger scale—how they interact with each other to create the web of ideas and feelings we call experience—is much less robust. Recently, for instance, two separate teams of researchers were testing a technique called deep brain stimulation to treat obesity on the one hand and Parkinson’s on the other. In the process, both teams made discoveries about the nature of memory and personality.

The phrase “deep brain stimulation” can’t help but sound bizarrely risqué, like some kind of sexy, subversive cerebral activity that’s intended to lead to a throbbing intellectual orgasm. The reality of this increasingly common medical procedure can be almost as difficult to wrap your mind around. The therapy involves a neurosurgeon tucking a tiny electrode deep into a particular location within the spongy, yielding tissue of your brain. Once it has been activated, the implant faithfully delivers a brief but intense pulse of electricity to the surrounding tissue, in regular intervals, for as long as it continues to reside there. The treatment has been described by more than one scientist as being a little bit like a “pacemaker for the brain.” Early forms of deep brain stimulation have been around since the 1960s, and the therapy is now used to treat everything from chronic pain to the startling verbal outbursts caused by Tourette’s syndrome.

Researchers have found that short, controlled stimulation of the brain tissue around the electrode can correct for the irregular or dysfunctional signals that are thought to be responsible for symptoms like the chronic muscle tremors and stiffness associated with Parkinson’s disease and multiple sclerosis. But the regular pulsations emitted by these hair-thin electrodes don’t just combat physical manifestations of disease. They seem to be effective in dealing with certain types of emotional and cognitive maladies, too. Some clinically depressed subjects, for whom the heavy veil of melancholy seemed impossible to lift, reported feeling lighter almost immediately after the current was turned on in their implants. The procedure has even helped to quiet the irresistible impulses experienced by patients with treatment-resistant obsessive compulsive disorder.

Despite its disquieting name, deep brain stimulation has proven to be a life-changing therapy for thousands of patients who suffer from otherwise intractable disorders. It’s also been an amazingly rich source of accidental discoveries about how the mind works.

One 2008 study conducted by a group of French psychiatrists, for example, found that some patients who had received years of deep brain stimulation treatments in order to control their Parkinson’s tremors became less able both to experience emotions such as motivation and interest, and to recognize emotions on human faces. These unintended effects of the therapy have helped to confirm that the the subthalamic nucleus of the brain is involved in regulating both motivation and facial emotion recognition.

In 2007, a team of Canadian physicians led by the Toronto Western Hospital’s Andres Lozano used deep brain stimulation on a patient who suffered from morbid obesity. The doctors hoped that receiving a session of deep brain stimulation would help to curb the patient’s appetite, as it had previously been shown to do in animals. Instead they found that the therapy caused the man, who was 50 years old, to experience sudden, vivid recollections of events that had taken place decades ago. They succeeded, in other words, in altering the signals his brain cells were sending to each other—but they failed to entirely predict the kinds of messages these altered signals would end up communicating. While undergoing the treatment, the patient reported that he felt as if he were in the midst of a crowd of old friends, as well as an old girlfriend, in a park—the remembered scene bright with rich color and movement. In addition, longer periods of stimulation enabled the patient to perform better on tests of memory. Lozano’s team published their discovery in the January 2008 issue of the Annals of Neurology, and some scientists speculate that their work may eventually lead to what could be a powerful treatment for people with cognitive disorders, such as Alzheimer’s, which cause memory loss.

That same year, scientists at the University of Arizona made an equally stunning discovery about the effects of brain stimulation on character. The team, led by psychologist Michael Frank, used a computer program that required the user to choose between “good” symbols (those that resulted in positive feedback 80% of the time) and “bad” ones (those that resulted in negative feedback 80% of the time) to study how how Parkinson’s patients who were receiving DBS made decisions. They found that patients being treated with DBS became far more impulsive than those on dopamine medications or healthy control. They couldn’t seem to stop themselves from choosing the bad symbol even when they knew it was likely to produce negative feedback. This impulsiveness was observed in more realistic situations as well. Wrote Frank of the first DBS patient in our study, who happened to be wheelchair-bound, that “when asked whether he might be more comfortable in a different chair situated across the room (he) immediately advanced toward that chair—ignoring the fact that he was not able to walk properly and was likely to fall.” What Frank and his colleagues believe is that by disrupting the electrical activity in an area of the brain known as the subthalamic nucleus, DBS effectively prevents people from taking their time when confronted with two conflicting options for how to behave.

Perhaps what’s most fascinating about both these findings is how directly and reliably the researchers were able to manipulate the experiences their patients were having. In the case of Lozano’s patient, the more current was used in the stimulation, the more details he was able to recall from his happy memory. In the case of the Parkinson’s patients, when the stimulation was removed, their cool-headed decision-making powers seemed instantly to return. Although it may seem presumptuous to interfere in such a direct and palpable way with the brain signals that control our thoughts, memories, and emotions, it’s worth remembering that the medications many of us take without much thought—and the meditation sessions many use to calm their thoughts—have precisely the same intent. The tangled networks that direct our conscious and unconscious selves are oddly, wonderfully malleable—just like our ever-evolving ideas about the brain itself.

Poke around for more on Inkling about the surprising behavior of the brain.

Raising the (Apparently) Dead

Meera Lee Sethi — 2009-10-07T21:43:00-06:00

Long before CPR or the appropriate application of defibrillators, medical experts were doing their damnedest to bring back the dead. In celebration of Inkling’s own revival, the approach of Halloween and—of course—our particular fondness for non-scientific science—we bring you a historical overview of these heroic, and often woefully misguided, pursuits.

Throughout most of human history, any case of successful resuscitation was credited not to human ingenuity, but to divine intervention. No one but Death himself, it was thought, could relinquish his iron grip upon the dead. Despite this, human ingenuity flourished. We have a long and glorious history of shocking and offensive attempts to rile the dead back into annoyed animation. Poking needles into them, say. Or punching them in the face. (Both these resuscitation techniques were documented in ancient texts). Anyone unfortunate enough to lapse into deep unconsciousness in the Middle Ages might have been whipped repeatedly with stinging nettles by Good Samaritans hoping to flagellate him or her to life.

Some ancient revivers took a rather obvious tack towards awakening the dead. Since dead bodies were cold bodies, it also came to be believed that the application of heat had the power to resuscitate. Hot ashes or even burning excrement (!) were sometimes heaped directly onto inert chests in an attempt to restore the warmth of the living from the outside. It may seem counter-intuitive to try to raise the dead with procedures that could well kill a person, but I suppose there is a sort of cheerful “No harm, no foul!” logic to these early tactics. After all, either you were definitively dead, in which case having your flesh singed wouldn’t harm you, or you still had some spark of life left in you, in which case even the most drastic measures would be worth it.

Some long-dead (ahem) methods of resuscitation were as much an assault on the late lamented’s dignity as anything else. This is especially true with the method of resuscitation known, distressingly, as “rectal fumigation with tobacco.” By the 18th century, it was known that tobacco was a powerful stimulant, and it was also believed that its capacity to arouse physiological or nervous system activity was especially potent in the intestines. As a result, one very common resuscitation technique involved filling a pair of bellows with tobacco smoke and puffing it into the victim’s rectum. Yes, you read that right. Dead people were forced to smoke through their rear-ends. So popular was this practice that it did not end until it was demonstrated that just a few ounces of tobacco introduced in this way would kill both dogs and cats—something which the brave British physiologist Benjamin Brodie thought to do in 1811.

There are reports from about the same time of such objects as corncobs and the beaks of ravens being used for the same violent purpose on stillborn newborns; the former seem uncomfortably large and the latter uncomfortably sharp, but perhaps I am clinging too closely to modern standards of care here. Other then-current neonatal resuscitation techniques included pinching, tickling, pulling on the tongue, swinging the baby upside down by the arms (with the cautionary note that slick birth fluids should be dried off first so as not to add to the unconscious baby’s troubles a swift journey through the air), and—notable for its simplicity—simply yelling loudly at the infant until it woke up and deigned to suck in some air. By the late nineteenth century, the startling mustard-up-the-nose method of reviving babies (popular a hundred years before) had gone out of style, but it was still common for physicians to use a nebulizer to create a fine mist of brandy in a breathing mask that was placed over the baby’s nose and mouth. Brandy for blue babies!

As anatomical science advanced, some resuscitation techniques at least took into consideration a basic understanding of the physiological principles behind respiration: In Europe and the United States at the beginning of the 19th century, drowning victims were frequently strapped onto the backs of horses, which were then sent trotting up and down the beach. It was hoped that the vigorous up-and-down motion of the horse’s back against the victim’s torso would cause the lungs to alternately compress and expand, forcing the return of airflow. Modern CPR techniques, though far less dramatic, are based on the same principle. In fact, the rate at which a horse typically canters—99 strides per minute—is very close to the currently recommended rate of 100 compressions per minute of CPR. Maybe they really did know what they were doing back then.

During the same period, Italian anatomist Luigi Galvani and his nephew Aldini began experimenting with the somewhat disreputable science of galvanism (using powerful electric currents to attempt to revive dead tissues into vitality), a deliciously grisly precursor to modern defibrillation techniques (it is Galvani to whom we owe the wonderful verb galvanize. Though their series of gruesome experiments on dogs, frogs, rabbits, oxes, and executed criminals never actually succeeded in raising the dead, the pair did titillate large audiences of aristocrats, scholars, and professionals with their demonstrations. Horror and delight mingle spookily in the testimony of one witness to the attempted resuscitation of a convicted murderer who had been hanged an hour previously: “The jaws of the deceased criminal began immediately to quiver; the adjoining muscles were contorted most horribly and one eye actually opened!”

Alarming and undignified as they may seem to us today, there’s something comforting about the inventiveness of these artifacts of the history of resuscitation. After all, there’s nothing dignified about death itself: it’s messy, cruel, and often degrading. We’re lucky to be living in the age of CPR, automated external defibrillators, and epinephrine shots, but even these tools of modern science only push death away a small fraction of the time. It’s a solace, in the face of that fact, to look back and know that truly—we’ve tried everything else.

For more morbid musings, check out Anna’s Death Map post.

Stress Everlasting: The Cautionary Tale of Stressed-Out Bunnies

Momoko Price — 2008-11-20T23:36:00-06:00

Whether at work or at home, we all experience the effects of stress, rarely heeding its red flags. The anxiety, the loss of appetite, the insomnia—most of us dismiss stress as little more than a psychological irritant, an ephemeral feeling that can knock us down; from which we can always bounce back.

But stress packs a heavier punch than we might think. Contrary to how we experience it, the physical effects of chronic stress go beyond the short term, and perhaps even beyond the long term. Because the latest research in stress physiology indicates that some effects of stress may not only last a lifetime, they could leak into your children and even their children—permanently.

While many stress physiologists examine stress in the lab, Dr. Rudy Boonstra, from the Centre for the Neurobiology of Stress at the University of Toronto, looks at stress in snowshoe hares in the forests of the Yukon. At first glance, snowshoe hares might seem like an odd choice for a stress research subject, but a closer look at their unusual life cycle indicates that these bunnies could be the poster-children for paranoia. These guys are seriously stressed out—pretty much all the time.

The Original Stress Bunny: Snowshoe Hares

“In the war between predators and prey, the snowshoe hares have lost,” Boonstra says flatly. “Animals under these conditions are making the best of a bad situation.”

Boonstra’s research opens a one-of-a-kind window into a mysterious mammalian life cycle that has puzzled biologists for years. Snowshoe hares go through a characteristic 10-year cycle, in which they happily pump out babies for a couple of years until the population peaks, and then die off for another four to five years until numbers start to creep up again.

Boonstra and his colleagues have spent years crossing off possible causes for the widespread crashes in snowshoe hare populations. So far, predation is the leading cause for why they crash, but the jury is still out for why populations can’t recuperate years down the line. Chronic stress is now a tantalizing hypothesis to explain their inability to bounce back.

“We don’t know what causes it, but I suspect it’s that they’re suffering from the ‘ghosts of predators past,’” Boonstra says, explaining further: “Imagine that you are a mother, and you have a child, and that child for whatever reason…dies. You will not be the same individual the next year as you were before…In other words, the chronic stress of having to deal with that situation may cause irreversible changes in the way your hippocampus is organized, which then shapes you for the future.”

Boonstra points to the research of neurophysiologists like Bruce McEwen and Robert Sapolsky, who have studied how chronic stress can actually shrink the hippocampus, the brain’s centre for memory, learning, and the regulation of stress itself. Because of its unique receptivity to stress hormones, the hippocampus can end up battered by long-term hormone exposure, causing reversible neuronal changes over the course of weeks, and irreversible neuron loss over the course of months. And since the hippocampus controls how we respond to stress, these changes can compromise our ability to deal with stress in the future. What Boonstra’s actually implying is that snowshoe hares’ brains could be so physically traumatized from the stress of predation that they just can’t calm down enough to raise healthy families later on.

Stress: The Gift That Keeps on Giving

But it doesn’t stop there—researchers are now looking into the inter-generational effects of stress in animal (and human) populations. In fact, the snowshoe hare cycle might be an extreme example of how stress can negatively impact future generations, by permanently modifying their expression of stress-associated genes.

Recent research by McGill psychobiologist Michael Meaney demonstrates that this kind of thing does in fact happen. In a surprisingly simple experiment, Meaney found that stressed-out mother rats who neglect their pups end up programming their babies to be stressed-out as adults. How? It turns out that Mom’s grooming and licking releases serotonin in pups’ brains, which triggers the expression and de-methylation of stress response-inhibiting genes. In other words, Mom’s nurturing not only turns on her babies’ calming genes, it programs her babies to be calmer permanently. Take away Mommy’s love, and you take away Baby’s ability to adapt to stress in the future.

Now researchers are wondering if the transfer of these kinds of permanent, epigenetic brain changes could account for poorer fitness in subsequent generations of snowshoe hares. “That’s one hypothesis, and until you actually test it, you can’t know for sure,” Boonstra admits. “But so far, it’s the most plausible one.”

The cycle of snowshoe hares, long cited as a classic example of predator-prey interactions in ecology textbooks, could soon come forth as an illuminating icon of what chronic stress is capable of in the natural world. And from it, scientists are realizing that stress is truly a force to be reckoned with, one that can affect us more than we’d like to admit.

The Kinda Food Where Greens Are Always Tastier

Karinna Sjo-Gaber — 2008-08-12T05:16:00-06:00

I’m no culinary wizard. Scratch that, I’m a dud in the kitchen. So my gastronomic deficiencies have allowed me to adopt a keen relish for dining out. From the first bite of buttered bread to the last sip of a warm cappuccino, I swoon over menu selections, service and good company from across the table.

But on my way home, belly full and food coma a comin’, I think back to the restaurant I just left. The gray sweet-smelling smoke heaves from the ovens while the air-conditioning coaxes a chill over my body. The glass bottles strewn in garbage bins. The polished, heavy silverware I grip in my fingers. The paper napkin folded across my lap and the slick Styrofoam container I leave with. It now seemed more like a crime scene.

Michael Oshman, Executive Director and Founder of the Green Restaurant Association (GRA), would agree. In 1990 he set out to encourage the $558 billion restaurant industry, occupying 10% of the U.S. economy and crowned the number one consumer of electricity in the retail sector, to swing sustainable.

Green Should be a Restaurant’s Golden Rule

There are approximately 945,000 restaurants across the U.S. Each one typically produces an average of 100,000 pounds of trash, uses 500,000 kilowatt hours of electricity and 800,000 gallons of water in only one year. All this contributes to the estimated 490 tons of carbon dioxide one restaurant produces annually—that’s 463,050,000 tons produced by restaurants across the country per year. Oy.

But with help from organizations like the GRA, restaurants can make the gutsy decision to become Green Certified. Oshman and his team have proven that sustainability and financial gain often walk arm-in-arm, a win-win for restaurant owners. Making food handling, storage and cooking more efficient, switching out incandescent light bulbs for compact fluorescent ones, using non toxic chemical cleaners and incorporating energy efficient spray valves in one establishment could lead to big savings. On top of these alterations, the GRA’s influence helps to assist manufacturers and distributors to lower product costs. A Green Certified establishment could save thousands of dollars in one year.

Other than persuading cash savings, sustainability has become all the rage. Green is splashed over advertising campaigns, bumper stickers, t-shirts. Even oil companies are putting their stake in green. And it’s oozing into the restaurant industry, too. A survey done by the National Restaurant Association (NRA) claims ‘environmentally friendly equipment that saves water and/or energy’ is one of the hottest new trends in restaurant kitchens; over 60 percent of restaurants installed energy-saving equipment in the last two years. The organization has also started a new green initiative to give the industry a nudge. Green sweet-talks customers to visit sustainable restaurants and woos them back with their positive effect on the community.

So if getting behind green results in saving massive amounts of water and electricity, upping profits and being a bit more popular in the public eye, why is it so hard to convert the business? Is there a psychological obstruction that makes people resist change? Or is it just pure laziness?

Eating Green isn’t just in your Veggies

The Boston-based Green Restaurant Association aims to answer the restaurant sustainability riddle by targeting the industry and the consumer. Attacking the issue from both sides means creating more responsible restaurants and ensuring the customer appreciates the issues. They’ve gone even further to make the Green Certification process simple and convenient to contend with the often sluggish reaction people have to change.

Working with 225 restaurants across 35 states in the U.S. and Canada, the GRA has helped a host of eateries commit to sustainability. To become a Green Certified Restaurant they had to replace all Styrofoam products, recycle every item accepted by local waste collection companies, follow the GRA environmental guidelines and execute one environmental step after signing their contract. Then, to continue membership, they have to complete four new steps each year.

Each restaurant is assigned an environmental consultant to gather information and identify areas of improvement. Each year they provide a list of six to eight suggested steps and the owner elects four to complete. As the basic environmental steps are realized, the changes get more and more sophisticated and their cost-effective choices start paying off.

“Nobody gets a free ride,” says Oshman. Whether it is a sprouts-veggies-hummus hipster joint or a meat ‘n potatoes beer-guzzling haunt, every café, bistro and sandwich shop can make better choices for the environment.

Environmentally Fair Fare

“Initially we wondered: are we doing this right? Because we didn’t get a reaction…but eventually it came,” says Bob Carroll owner of The Bayside Restaurant in Westport, Massachusetts. Tagged “the best dinky little restaurant in the Commonwealth for over thirty years”, The Bayside was voted the first Green Restaurant in the state by the GRA in 2003.

Along with his wife, Nancy, the Carrolls opened The Bayside in 1974 in a remote village called Horseneck Beach. The small yellow building is nestled across the road from the ocean with views of Cape Cod across the bay. With a breezy outdoor patio and a cozy indoor dining room, the restaurant gives off an informal, friendly vibe. There are only a few restaurants nearby, so while many of the guests are repeat customers, the weekend brings hoards of outsiders discovering the beauty of small Westport.

During Bayside’s infant years, Bob knew there was a problem when he filled up his truck with recyclables and noticed the garbage wasn’t separated at the landfill—he had to do it himself. After discussing the matter at town meetings, recycling programs were finally offered; this event inspired the Carrolls to make further revisions.

“I believe in fresh, real, honest, authentic food,” says Nancy who considers locally grown and organic products the best-tasting and reminiscent of the foods she ate growing up on a farm. The vegetables, berries, sodas, beer, wine, fish, and quahogs—their specialty—are either grown by the farmer down the street, distilled in the brewery minutes away or plucked from the Westport River. They also use free-range chicken and grass-fed cattle.

In essence, the Carrolls have been operating in the green since before anyone had a definition for it. After reading about the GRA in a trade magazine, they decided to obtain Green Certification which invited many changes around The Bayside. They use non-toxic chemical cleaners, recycled chlorine free paper napkins and compact fluorescent light bulbs. In the kitchen, they installed Energystar appliances to increase efficiency. You’ll find corn-based cutlery on the tables and outside, the Carrolls operate their own well. They collect used frying oil which at least five local farmers convert to biodiesel for their trucks. This year they’ll work to start composting, and Bob and Nancy dream of receiving enough funding for a wind turbine, a major feat.

“We have to be responsible for what we put in our mouths,” Nancy says. The Carrolls try to educate their customers who have gradually become more conscious of the environmental strides they’ve taken. “We think about it constantly,” Bob tells me, and he encourages his guests to think about it, too. They not only provide an admirable example for their gaggle of kids and grandkids, but also for the restaurant industry.

Get Your Daily Helping of Green

Sure, the food was tasty and the service snappy, but my morality refuses to be sated. As I leave dinner, I think my stomach and my ethics would now be contented if I visited a green restaurant instead. Luckily most states offer green cuisine options serving up palatable platefuls that fill up stomach and soul. So next time I’ll make the wise decision to dine sustainable and support the restaurants that have made the bold choice to give us a better choice when it comes to food.

The Ultimate Problemsolver: Computer + Evolution = Genius

Elan Dubrofsky — 2008-07-08T17:13:00-06:00

Lee Graham has been fascinated with both biology and computers ever since he was a young boy. These two interests have come together into an innovative new trend called evolutionary computing. Lee is playing his role with his ”Virtual Creatures” evolution simulator.

Lee grew up in a house with a huge forest in the backyard and he loved to catch and study animals such as frogs and snakes. When not out learning about nature, he could often be found on a computer such as the one his father bought him when he was 7 years old. “I had to choose between biology and computer science” recalls Lee from his high school days. “I went with computers because I thought that would lead to better opportunities”. What he didn’t realize was just how useful his background in biology would prove to be.

As Lee was nearing the end of his undergraduate computer science degree at Carleton University he noticed a course in evolutionary computing. Evolution, a theory first published by Charles Darwin in his “On the Origin of Species” proposes that species can evolve over the course of generations by means of random mutation and natural selection. Evolutionary computing uses these concepts to enhance the capabilities of computer programs.

The course propelled Lee into an academic career exploring the power of evolution as a computer algorithm, which is a procedure for solving problems. For his PHD thesis he developed a computer program called “Virtual Creatures”, a system that uses evolutionary processes to transform simple blocks, or cuboids, into complex creatures. You set what qualities will be considered beneficial in the potential creature, also known as the fitness function, and evolution does the rest of the work. The results are often far from predictable. “Lots of times I use the same fitness function and there is a new creature every time” says Lee. “That is my favorite part.”

Evolutionary algorithms are used to solve the problem of optimization. Holger Hoos, a computer science professor at UBC, explains that an optimization problem is one where there are many possible solutions and the goal is to find the best one. Dr. Hoos notes that these types of problems are ubiquitous. “There are tons of optimization problems out there. They occur in all sciences and in industry as well”.

The classic example is called the travelling salesman. Here a salesman has to visit a number of cities and there is a cost associated with traveling from any one city to another. The goal is to figure out the cheapest way for the salesman to visit each city and return to where he started.

Evolutionary algorithms are one of the hot tools being used to solve problems like this. “An evolutionary algorithm is one that mimics certain principles from biological evolution,” explains Dr. Hoos. To solve an optimization problem with an evolutionary algorithm you need to start with a set of possible solutions. By applying evolutionary operators to these solutions, better solutions can emerge.

This takes place through processes of mutation, recombination and selection. Mutation means making random small changes to some of the solutions. Recombination involves combining parts from two “parent” solutions to create a new “child” solution. This is similar to what happens in humans when sperm cells and egg cells are combined. Selection is the process of keeping the best, or most “fit”, solutions and throwing out the weak ones. Just like with biological evolution, if you apply these three operators repeatedly the results can be surprisingly impressive.

Lee’s program uses an evolutionary algorithm such as this to create his virtual creatures. “The most fun for the user is that you can tune the fitness measure,” says Lee. “This means that you can say what it is about creatures that you will like”. Some of Lee’s fitness measures include how fast the creature can run, how high it can jump, whether it will evolve on flat or rugged terrain and its average height above the ground.

Once the fitness measure has been set, the process of evolution can be started. “The program will keep going, generation after generation” says Lee. “It often takes days and weeks of computing time for one creature to evolve to completion”. Since his program takes so long to run, Lee decided to put it on his website and ask people to donate CPU time to run his experiments.

Shane Killian, a web designer from North Carolina, is one of over 70 people that volunteered to test Lee’s program. “It sounded cool and I thought I’d give it a shot,” says Shane. He still recalls the first creature his computer evolved. “It was a kind of a one-eared bunny. It hopped, and had this head, and had one long ear sticking out of it”. Even Lee was surprised when he saw the result. “He was actually afraid for a bit that the bunny was cheating because of how well it worked” recalls Shane.

Shane sees Lee’s program a great educational tool. “You get a really good sense of how powerful evolution is. You start out with these sorry random creatures who can hardly do anything except fall over, and 500 generations later you have this amazing thing that looks like someone designed it,” says Shane.

Lee appreciates his program’s educational value, but he created it to test new theories of how evolutionary algorithms can be improved. One such theory he has been working on is called exaptation. This is where a trait evolves because it serves one function and subsequently evolves to serve another. The example he gives is how birds evolved from dinosaurs. “Their forelimbs were exapted to become wings,” explains Lee. While their initial function was for walking, they later evolved to aid in flight.

While Lee explores evolutionary algorithms for academic purposes, Dr. Hoos is currently consulting for a Vancouver company called Actenum that specializes in tackling environmentally-related optimization problems. He believes that solving optimization problems will be key in answering the challenges of our time. “At the heart of many conflicts in the world there is competition for resources. Since these resources are quite limited, we need to find efficient ways to utilize them”. He refers to fossil fuels specifically. “One key to making progress in global warming is to use fossil fuels more efficiently. This is an optimization problem”.

With the role of optimization problems increasing so rapidly, so will the need for evolutionary algorithms. There are already many success stories, including the design of a NASA antenna in 2006. Using an evolutionary algorithm, the US space agency produced the ST5 X-band antenna that according to Lee “looked kind of funky” but worked amazingly well. “It consumed less power, took less man hours to produce and outperformed its conventionally designed counterpart,” says Lee.

In September 2008, evolution will take another leap, this time into pop culture. The evolution-based video game Spore was announced in 2005 by Electronic Arts and has since become one of the most anticipated game releases in recent memory. It was voted as best in show at the E3 video games trade show in both 2005 and 2006. “The only reason it didn’t win 2007 was because people were tired of it winning” says avid gamer Jonathan Abrams. “It’s also been heavily covered by gaming magazines and blogs.”

Abrams is looking forward to becoming a virtual evolutionary biologist when Spore is finally released. “The scope of Spore is much bigger than any game I have ever seen” says Abrams. “In most games, you control characters that have been designed for you, to do tasks that have been designed for you. Spore will allow the player to evolve creatures and share them with other players over the internet. I don’t think even the developers can predict what kind of strange creatures will be developed once the game is released.”

Whether it is being used to generate virtual creatures, build antennas, solve global warming or entertain gamers, evolution is a concept that has evolved beyond the scope of biology alone. Lee believes that the field of evolutionary computing is still in its infancy and its potential is limitless. “In the future as computing power increases we’ll be able to do some interesting robot evolution” predicts Lee. “We’ll be able to simply propose a problem that you want the robot to solve and let the robot evolve to figure out how to solve it.”

For now, Lee is happy that programs such as his are able increase the public awareness of evolution and biology. “I would like to steer the software in the direction of something that’s easy and enjoyable for the average Joe to use,” comments Lee. “Hopefully people will get some experience with evolutionary computing, and through that gain an understanding of evolution itself, which is seriously lacking nowadays.”

How One Doctor Fights the Grim Spectre of Bleeding to Death

Lucas Rizoli — 2008-06-19T16:12:00-06:00

Traffic is moving well. I’m in a car with Dr. Sandro Rizoli, somewhere between Toronto and Hamilton, Ontario. There are coolers full of blood in the back seats and trunk. “If someone rear-ends us right now,” Dr. Rizoli says, “they’re going to feel really bad: there’ll be blood everywhere.”

He jokes, but he takes car accidents very seriously in his work as a surgeon. Car accidents are one of the leading causes of life-threatening injuries, what doctors call trauma. Of all the Canadians admitted for trauma each year, 6500 die. It is the leading cause of death for people under the age of 45 in Canada and worldwide.

“Trauma patients die from two things: head injuries or bleeding,” says Dr. Rizoli. Head injuries and brain damage are tough, but “patients that don’t stop bleeding are worse. No matter how well we stitch them up, if they keep bleeding, they won’t get better.”

Dr. Rizoli is the director of trauma research at the Sunnybrook Institute and an assistant professor at the University of Toronto. His research focuses on bleeding and trauma. He is also my dad, which is why I am in the car with him. He needs someone to carry the coolers.

Normally, the body stops bleeding by coagulating. Coagulation is the process that creates scabs, like when you scrape your knee. It keeps you from losing blood, and is the first step in healing.

Trouble is, trauma patients’ bodies do not act normally. Injury and shock can cause patients to become coagulopathic, that is, unable to stop bleeding. The chemical processes involved in coagulation may have trouble because of complications like hypothermia or increased blood acidity. It is also possible that patients have already lost too much blood, and along with it, many of the chemicals and building blocks needed to clot. Without scabs and clots, organs fail and patients die.

In trauma “we have to make most decisions looking at the patient. Problem is, that’s too late,” says Dr. Rizoli. If doctors knew that a trauma patient will become coagulopathic, they could do something about it. “What we need is a warning.”

Searching for the red flag that says: “I can’t stop this bleeding, deep inside of me”

Dr. Rizoli’s most recent work is searching for just that. He and his researchers at Sunnybrook are studying a blood test called thromboelastography (TEG, for short) that may be able to identify coagulopathic patients quickly.

Blood tests commonly used in trauma are not very good at this. “[They] don’t give us enough of the right kind of information.” Dr. Rizoli believes TEG may provide the right kind of information. While other tests isolate certain aspects of blood clotting, TEG uses whole blood and can provide a “big picture understanding” of coagulation.

The mechanics of thromboelastography are reasonably simple. A blood sample is put in a cup. This cup rotates gently, simulating the movement of blood in the body. A small cylinder is lowered into the middle of the cup. The cylinder and the cup do not touch, so that the rotation of the cup doesn’t rotate the cylinder.

Over time, the blood begins coagulating and clots form between the cup and the cylinder. The clots connect them and the cup’s motion begins to rotate the cylinder. By measuring when and how the cylinder moves, it is possible to see how quickly the blood coagulates, how strong its clots are, and how soon they fall apart.

TEG results can tell doctors “not just what’s wrong, but how to treat it,” says Dr. Rizoli. If the time before clotting is too long, patients may be missing the chemical factors that start the process. If the clots are weak, patients may be missing platelets, the building blocks of scabs. If the clots fall apart too quickly, the patient may need drugs to keep them from doing so.

This information could not only save lives, but also blood. Dr. Rizoli tells me about one patient who would not stop bleeding, despite doctors’ best efforts. The patient required so much that the hospital had to re-schedule operations for lack of blood. Identifying and treating coagulopathic patients early may reduce the need for massive blood transfusions later on, reducing the demand for blood.

Calibrating Coagulation

Strangely, this potentially useful test has been around for over fifty years. It was first described by Dr. Hellmut Hartert in 1948, and has been used by anesthesiologists and cardiac surgeons for years.

One of the reasons why taken trauma doctors haven’t already looked at TEG is that it’s been very difficult to carry out quickly and consistently. TEG machines have only recently become practical thanks to computer technology, explains Dr. Rizoli. Computers can graph and calculate much more quickly than trauma docs, who work under a great deal of pressure.

“Still, it’s not perfect. It’s a needy machine.” It needs to be calibrated three times a day. It requires a certain temperature. It has to be in a place where it won’t be bumped, since that could break clots and ruin the results. These things can be controlled in a scheduled operation, but not in a chaotic emergency room.

It is also hard to tell which TEG results are normal and which are a sign of trouble. In heart surgery, doctors can compare results taken during the operation to results from before the operation. Unforeseen differences between them indicate blood problems. “But they see the patient normal and then mess them up. With trauma, they come in already messed up.” There’s no before to compare to. According to an upcoming paper by Dr. Sandro Scarpelini, TEG in trauma “remains scarcely used due to lack of standard techniques and normal values.” If the test is going to be useful in trauma, doctors need a standard to compare their results to.

Which is why we’re chauffeuring three gallons of blood. It comes from 600 trauma patients, collected as part of a large study headed by Dr. Rizoli. The 2200 samples were taken while the patients were being treated at the hospital. Every time blood was required for a test, a sample was also taken for TEG testing.

These TEG tests were carried out very precisely. “We standardized everything,” says Dr. Rizoli. “From the gauge of the needle [used to take the blood], to how many times to shake the bottle, to how long the machine had been left on.” A dedicated technician carried out the tests.

We are taking the blood samples to a laboratory at McMaster University that specializes in blood analysis. In the next few months, they will be examined for traces of the chemicals involved in coagulation and evidence of clots. These results will be matched against the TEG results, as well as patient histories.

“We want to see whether TEG picked up on patients who couldn’t clot.” If it did, the information could be used to establish standards for TEG testing in trauma, and perhaps lead to its use in the trauma centre.

Other researchers are also excited by the potential of TEG. Dr. Kenji Inaba, a trauma researcher at the University of Southern California, has recently acquired a TEG machine. He has been “playing with TEG using pigs’ blood,” and is “just getting comfortable with it.” When he hears of Dr. Rizoli’s study, he’s impressed. He believes that there is “a lot of interest in TEG in trauma,” and that the study will “beat everybody to the punch.”

Dr. Rizoli says that may be, but that there’s still a long way to go. Data is still being collected from patients that have been at the hospital a long time. “There’s a massive amount of data.” It took almost four days just to label all the blood samples. It will be months before the test results and patient histories are matched up and analyzed.

In comparison, carrying those coolers isn’t really so hard.

Nurture Your Inner Psychic - No Paranormal Powers Required!

Meera Lee Sethi — 2008-05-17T17:45:00-06:00

Nicholas Epley believes you’re a mind reader. No, he doesn’t think you know a magic trick that will allow you to divine other people’s thoughts at a cocktail party. He’s not suggesting that you’ve developed intuitive “psychic connections” with your loved ones. And he hasn’t confused you for someone who’s dug out an old phrenology manual and started laying hands on other people’s heads, examining the bumps and lumps on their skulls for clues about their natural proclivities.

Epley is a thoroughly pragmatic social psychologist whose major scientific interest is a much more everyday kind of mind reading. What he studies is how, and how accurately, people intuit each other’s thoughts. Based at the University of Chicago’s Graduate School of Business, Epley’s research explores how we figure out the answers to questions such as these: How well does my boss think I’m doing on this project? Will my friend forgive me for getting drunk and insulting her dress? Was that thing someone just said to me meant to be aggressive, or was it a joke? Does this person think I’m smart? Do they think I’m interesting? And, perhaps most fundamentally of all, Do they think I’m hot or not?

The answers to these questions are particularly useful to us humans; we are a highly social species, and being obtuse about what others are thinking and feeling can lead to misfortune. An employee who values terse efficiency may be passed over for promotion if she doesn’t realize that her boss prefers a little small talk before meetings. A prospective suitor who can’t read the subtle moods of his love-interest may be driven away in frustration.

Still, cultural convention and personal reticence combine to make interrogating others about their private thoughts a less than practical solution. What most of us do instead is seek approximate answers to these queries based on information we already have about other people and ourselves. We do our best, in other words, to read minds.

The problem, says Epley, is that we’re not actually very good at it.

During a recent lecture in Chicago, part of an MBA course in organizational management he is teaching this quarter, Epley delighted in presenting his students with examples of exactly how dreadful most people are at sussing out other people’s thoughts. For instance, he described a series of informal experiments he’d conducted at the beginning of the quarter in which he asked business school students to predict how their peers would judge them. What did they think others would say about “how nice they were, how outgoing they were, how assertive they were,” Epley asked? Participants’ predictions turned out to be no better than random guesses.

Other behavioral scientists have researched how accurately couples in long-term relationships reported their partners’ beliefs. And in a variety of other studies, people have been asked to intuit others’ moods based on their faces, tones of voice, or the wording of their statements. In every case, whether participants are trying to make judgments about the thoughts and feelings of strangers, spouses, or best friends, people’s ability to accurately read minds is—as Epley puts it—“stunningly unimpressive.”

Epley, a tall and energetic man, describes these results with a showman’s timing, a storyteller’s feel for drama, and a scientist’s sense of intellectual mischief. It’s clear that he takes pleasure in using the tools of his profession to test the logic of our most basic social intuitions. His research, Epley says, is essentially “the scientific study of everyday life. We take your everyday experience and bring it into the laboratory and try to understand why you think as you do, why you believe what you do, act as you do.”

In a series of recent studies, for instance, he looked at anthropomorphism, the belief that a nonhuman thing like a car or a pet possesses human-like emotions and thoughts. On the one hand, you might see this phenomenon as a classic mind-reading “mistake”—when we anthropomorphize, what we’re essentially doing is trying to read the mind of something that arguably doesn’t have a mind at all. Yet Epley’s work shows that this kind of “creative” mind reading has a purpose: we do it more often when we’re lonely, as a way of providing ourselves with much-needed social connection. The study was published in the February 2008 issue of Psychological Science.

In another study, published in the July 2001 Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Epley found that when people do something embarrassing, they feel much more chagrined than they should, because they “overestimate how harshly they’re going to be judged by other people.” Our brains want to help us avoid social shame. Unfortunately, they do so by wildly exaggerating our beliefs about how much we have lost face in the eyes of others. Knowing this can help to ease the pain of public disgrace. And since, as Epley notes, “one of the leading causes of suicide among teenagers is the belief that they have embarrassed themselves beyond repair,” it might even be something we’d want to teach in high school biology classes.

Epley’s research lends itself to other such practical applications. In one ongoing project, the results of which are slated to be published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, he’s trying to improve people’s ability to accurately assess how attractive others will find them—what he likes to refer to as the “Am I hot or not?” question. It’s an issue of burning relevance to his subjects, many of whom are university students.

To have even a hope of getting this question right, Epley says, we must first let go of the mountain of information we know about ourselves. “I know, for instance, that my hair looks worse today than it did yesterday, or that my morning lecture went so much better than my afternoon lecture. You don’t know any of this.” Not surprisingly, people become distracted by this plethora of minutia and can’t develop a big picture perspective on the kind of person they are. As a result, they’re not able to assess their own qualities objectively.

But we can trick the mind into ignoring these extraneous details. To do this, Epley has his subjects predict how a stranger will rate them, not now, but at some later point—say, three months in the future. At first the correlation between the subjects’ predicted attractiveness ratings and the true ratings they received was barely existent. But with the future tense clause in place, subjects’ guesses shot much closer to their raters’ true perceptions.

There are a variety of other tools and tricks that you can use to combat errors in mind reading. For example, in order to step out of the egocentric bias that causes you to use yourself as the only model for how the human mind works, Epley suggests that you actively and openly seek the perspectives of others. And when you’re imagining the beliefs of another person, he says, pay attention to the fact that you’re constructing your imaginings. Don’t think that your perceptions of people’s behavior are anywhere near as concrete as your perceptions of sights, sounds, tastes, and smells—even though it may feel that way.

Epley says he doesn’t have a magic pill that’s going to suddenly make people’s thoughts an open book. But the tools he lays out do have the advantage of being both simple and, at least according to preliminary research, rather effective. Unlike magicians, psychics, and phrenologists, most people read minds “automatically, reflexively, and spontaneously,” explains Epley. They’re barely conscious of what they’re doing or how they’re doing it. Simply changing that basic fact—becoming aware of how your own expectations color your guesses about the mental and emotional states of others—can improve mind reading accuracy by leaps and bounds.

Go ahead. Try it. And if you figure out a way to get especially good at it, you might want to pay Epley a visit in his office. There’s a good chance you’ll find something interesting on his mind.

Babe Scientists on Film

Sarah Fobes — 2008-05-06T18:24:00-06:00

Lady scientists are popping up in movies all over the place these days. From neuroscientists and nuclear physicists to virologists and paleontologists, these gals are working their on screen appeal to defy ye olde stereotype of the old white man academician.

But it’s not all girl power and intellectual equality. For it remains the sworn duty of mainstream film producers to employ clever plot devices designed to remind audiences that even though ladies can have book smarts, at the end of the day they are still simply…women. Erratic, overly emotional, frequently distraught and boy-crazy, I call these handy reminders the “Hollywood Coping Mechanism” or HCM for short.

Here’s a random smattering of this standard in action. How did I compile this list? My selections were made after searching the keywords “babe scientists” on the Internet Movie Database. Really.

Contact (1997) starring Jodie Foster

Dr. Ellie Arroway is a gifted scientist and researcher working on the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) program. She is shown developing an interest in science as a child and getting a prestigious education at MIT. This is one of the better portrayals of a female scientist in modern cinema. Why? Because it was written by a scientist, Dr. Carl Sagan, not a screenwriter.

The HCM: Matthew McConaughey as a tanned spiritual advisor who “softens” our lead lady with his mellow charm and curly, well-conditioned locks. See audience! She’s still a woman!

Jurassic Park (1993) and The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997), starring Laura Dern and Julianne Moore

A quick-witted paleobotanist (Dern) and a cagey behavioral paleontologist (Moore) are wonderful additions to this painfully short list. Incidentally, in both cases these scientists also happen to be the girlfriends of the male leads.

The HCM: Once the chaos ensues, the Dern’s character’s scholarly leanings take a backseat to her maternal instinct, and she becomes babysitter to the two helpless children. In the sequel, The Lost World, Julianne Moore’s character dissolves fairly quickly into the standard issue damsel in distress, requiring multiple rescues. Both characters do a lot of screaming.

Deep Blue Sea (1999), starring Saffron Burrows

Burrows plays Dr. Susan McAlester, a brilliant research scientist searching for a cure for Alzheimer’s disease using harvested brain tissue from giant genetically engineered mako sharks. You know, the old story.

The HCM: A female scientist dedicated to her research? Clearly unstable. Toss in the disturbing fact that she shows little to no interest in our rugged male hero (Thomas Jane) and we can surmise that she probably wouldn’t survive. Outcome? Torn in half and eaten by shark.

*Horrifying side note* In the original ending, her character survives, but test audiences hated her so much (shouting “die, bitch” at the screen) that the filmmakers re-shot the ending with a grotesque death scene for our female lead, proving the extreme necessity for the HCM if producers hope to achieve box office smash potential.

Chain Reaction (1996), starring Rachel Weisz

Dr. Lily Sinclair is a physicist who has spent her entire career working on a green fuel project. Despite her prescription glasses, Dr. Sinclair just can’t get it right...cold fusion eludes her.

The HCM: Keanu Reeves surfs into the picture to save the day. Although his character is NOT A SCIENTIST, he figures out what Dr. Sinclair and her team could not. When the real action starts, Dr. Sinclair comes along for the ride, but only in the capacity of Keanu’s attractive carry-on luggage.

Sunshine (2007), starring Michelle Yeoh

Dr. Corazon, a biologist, is the only female scientist on board a spaceship whose mission is to save the human race from extinction by reigniting the dying sun.

The HCM: Yeoh’s Dr. Corazon does plenty of docile peacekeeping amongst the volatile men on the ship. She also does a lot of gardening. In her last scene, we see her holding a tiny plant and weeping before she gets killed to death by man possessing superhuman strength.

The Alien Quadrilogy (1979, 1986, 1992, 1997), starring Sigourney Weaver

Ellen Ripley is an aeronautical engineer, although this is not well known to anyone other than crazed film nerds. I felt compelled to include her on this list, as she is one of the best female characters in film history, and the rest of the list was making me sad.

The HCM: Ripley appears immune to the HCM. Audiences loved her, and even when filmmakers tried to kill her in Alien 3, she came back all cloned and toned in Alien: Resurrection.

There were a handful of others considered for the list: Tara Reid as genius anthropologist Dr. Aline Cedrac in Alone In The Dark, one of the worst films of all time; Ming-Na as Dr. Aki Ross in Final Fantasy, a cool character, but completely computer animated; any number of Bond Girls, who are often scientists although they spend no time doing any kind of science on screen. For example, in The World Is Not Enough, Denise Richards plays nuclear physicist Dr. Christmas Jones. I think I need to type that again. Nuclear physicist Dr. Christmas Jones. She carries a briefcase and other assorted mystery instruments, but mostly just works her short shorts.

Television does a far better job of representing women in the sciences, but that’s a whole other list. I may wear sufficiently thick glasses, but as a woman I can only research and write one comprehensive list at a time. If that.

What Ever Happened to Baby Albert?

Bryn Robinson — 2008-04-18T19:56:00-06:00

At a special time in my Introductory Psychology class, it’s time to tell my latest batch of students about a particular classic psychology experiment. And like many good yarns, it’s a tale that involves a healthy dose of sex, lies – and the ethically questionable participation of an innocent infant called Little Albert.

In 1920, John B. Watson was a successful psychologist at Johns Hopkins University. During his tenure as an eminent scientist, Watson was also department chair, with a loving wife at home as well as a tasty side dish in his lab (in the form of Rosalie Rayner, graduate student and research assistant in his lab). For John Watson, life was good.

Watson’s biggest contribution to psychology was his beliefs on behaviourism, or the influence of our experiences on our overt actions. He claimed that any infant could grow up to be either a doctor or a thief, depending upon the environment in which they were raised. In fact, Watson felt that the environment holds such power over behavior he claimed that he could create true phobias given the right conditions.

So Watson and Rayner embarked on what would become Watson’s final published work. Appearing in a 1920 issue of the Journal of Experimental Psychology, it was a test of his theory that fear towards an animal could be created, and that this fear could then be transferred to other animals similar in appearance. All the researchers needed was a blank slate…

Enter Albert B., aged 11 months, stage right. Little Albert was raised almost completely from birth at the hospital, with his mother working as a wet nurse at a nearby home for ‘invalid’ children. Watson chose Albert for this experiment specifically because he was passive, stable and unemotional – the idea being that the child’s personality would guard against any lasting effects of the experiment.

When the researchers first met Albert, he showed no fear towards the test animal they had chosen - a fluffy white rat. Once the research began, Albert was introduced to the rodent repeatedly. However, each time that Albert would reach out to pet the rat, Watson would strike an iron bar with a hammer behind Albert’s head. The clanging sound scared Albert, and he would start to cry. With enough pairings of the loud noise and the presence of the white rat, Albert soon associated the rat with the fear of the sound. Seeing the white rat all by himself was enough to scare the diapers off of Little Albert. In fact, the fear response was so strong that he generalized his fear to a laundry list of similar-looking items: a Santa Claus mask, Watson’s head of greying hair, a rabbit, etc.

This experiment lasted for months, but before the researchers could reverse the effects of Albert’s conditioned fears, there was a shakedown at the research lab/love nest. Albert’s mother whisked the child away from the mad scientists. Watson and Rayner were evidently baffled by her rash action, but others have assumed that the mother was never given complete informed consent; once she discovered what was taking place, she became angry and removed Little Albert from their clutches. No one has seen or heard from the little lad since. The end.

At this point in the lecture, my students stare at me in disbelief. How could scientists do this to an infant? Was he scarred for life? Did he move to the tropics, unable to contend with frosty white winters and women sporting fur coats? Did his fear of the white and fluffy transfer into an aggression only satiated by clubbing baby seals in the frigid Canadian North? Doesn’t anyone know what happened to Little Albert?

The truth behind the tale of Little Albert is simple: no one knows what happened to him. The tryst between Watson and Rayner was exposed soon after the experiment ended, forcing the psychologist to resign from Johns Hopkins. Although he ran away with Rayner and had a successful career in advertising, Watson never overcame the loss of his academic career. Shortly before his death in 1958, he burned all of his documents – and any chance of learning Albert’s full identity.

To further compound the mystery, a 1989 review by Paul and Blumenthal of the University of Massachusetts published in the Psychological Record found that textbooks would often alter details of the experiment or fabricate a “happy ending” where Albert goes on to live a mentally healthy and happy life.

In the most detailed examination of the Little Albert experiment, Benjamin Harris of Vassar College notes in a 1979 issue of American Psychologist that Watson himself would change aspects of the experiment to improve the appearance of the experiment. Compound these inaccuracies with Internet rumors that Little Albert was an orphan stolen for experimentation/a kid that Watson babysat for a university janitor/Watson’s very own son, and it’s easy to see how the mystery around the myth has continued decades after the original experiment.

But take heart. Although many versions of the story claim that Albert’s conditioning was never reversed, there might not have even been a phobia to extinguish. Harris’ review found that after Albert supposedly acquired his intense phobia of the white rat, there were random intervals during testing when Albert seemed completely fine with the rodent. Watson and Rayner would sometimes find the boy petting the rat without any apparent fear, just a healthy dose of average childhood curiosity.

If the phobia was as intense as the researchers claimed, Little Albert would have consistently drawn back from the rodent. Add that inconsistency to grand claims made on the basis of one study, with one participant with no successful replications since, and it’s questionable that Albert’s fear was even created in the first place. Little Albert, supposed victim of one of psychology’s most famous and diabolical experiments, was merely the participant of a weak pilot study that never really worked. He probably turned out fine.

Then again, if you see an elderly gentleman have an anxiety attack at the sight of the Easter Bunny in a mall, give me a call.

The (Real) Sound of Silence

Meera Lee Sethi — 2008-03-19T06:34:00-06:00

In the second section of Samuel Barber’s exquisitely mournful composition “Adagio for Strings,” the cellos, violas, and violins join together to build to a rising melodic climax, reaching a thrilling, almost keening peak of grief - and then sharply stop. There is a breathtaking silence that lasts several long seconds. Finally, after more than a few thudding heartbeats, the instruments resume their play with a series of soft chords that now seem painfully delicate, carrying the piece to its sighing, fading conclusion.

When you listen to “Adagio for Strings,” that brief pause two thirds of the way into the music is anything but empty; in fact, it fairly aches with woe. Of course classical composers, jazz musicians, and pop stars alike have always known the power of the pregnant pause. They carefully insert silence in between their notes, using it like a supple extra voice. It can be full of tension, humor, serenity, or dramatic finality, its character conditioned by the shape of the space it occupies. And now psychologists and neuroscientists are beginning to unravel why, exactly, silence speaks so many volumes.

For example last year University of Arkansas researcher Elizabeth Margulis showed that people hear pauses in music very differently based on the specific context of the silence. Using listening tests to investigate people’s responses to silences contained within musical excerpts, she found that participants perceived changes in both the duration and the amount of tension in the acoustic void depending on the music around it. Margulis also asked participants to report whether they had experienced “a sensation of beats” during a musical silence and indeed some listeners reported hearing subtle differences in what they perceive as the meter of the very same silence—an astonishing, yet somehow intuitive finding. Silence, it seems, actually has a rhythm. The most rhythmic silence in Margulis’s study belonged to an excerpt from Beethoven’s Hammerklavier Sonata, where a pattern of strong, then soft, beats had been clearly established. When the pause arrived, straight after a strong beat, listeners instinctively supplied their own answering pulse to continue the pattern.

It shouldn’t really be a revelation that this is so. University of California, San Diego neuroscientist Vilayanur Ramachandran, an expert on visual perception, is one of many scientists who have observed that the brain, like nature, abhors a vacuum. Ramachandran uses this insight to explain the workings of various optical illusions. These usually occur because the brain automatically fills in any odd gaps in its retinal image, resulting in convincingly complete, but sometimes erroneous, impressions of the world around us. The brain appears to deal with auditory caesuras in much the same way. It deftly smooths out rifts in the landscape of sound by suffusing the quiet chasms with its own ideas about what ought to belong there.

Margulis agrees. In her study, which was published in the June 2007 issue of the journal Music Perception she writes that “impressions of the music that preceded the silence seep into the gap, as do expectations about what may follow.”

While this may sound like a bad thing—our minds won’t even let us enjoy a moment’s peaceful rest without attempting to cram it full of meaning!—the work of scientists at Stanford University’s School of Medicine suggests that the opposite is probably true. A team led by psychiatrist Vinod Menon used fMRI scans to look at the brains of volunteers as they listened to an unfamiliar18th century symphony, revealing that without pauses, the brain tends to get, well, just a little sidetracked when it hears long stretches of uninterrupted music. A continuous melodic flow allows our attention to wander, and overall cognitive activity is surprisingly subdued during these periods.

When you thrown in an unexpected silence in the midst of the instrumentation, however, neuronal activity spikes right away. Silence, it turns out, creates a veritable cognitive commotion in both the ventral and dorsal regions of the right prefrontal cortex. These are areas of the brain that are known to play an important role in learning and memory. It’s as if the pauses in the music trigger the brain to sit up and pay close attention, activating working memory and stimulating the vigorous processing of both the sounds we’ve just heard and those we’re about to hear.

Essentially the authors suggest that silence may be what prompts our minds to pick out “salient events"—the beginning of the next movement, say—from what would otherwise be nothing but “a continuous stream of undifferentiated information.” Silence doesn’t just affect the brain, either. According to Menon, the heart rates of his subjects often changed markedly during the pauses as well. Our whole bodies are profoundly affected by these moments of apparent nothingness.

So the brain abhors a vacuum, and works very hard to pour its own percolating predictions into perceptual gaps wherever they occur. At the same time, without these gaps—without some moments of stillness in the confusion of life—the brain would be hard-pressed to properly process the concrete details of the world. What a temperamental, contradictory creature inhabits our skulls.

But what delight arises from its contradictions. Who among us, after all, would give up the experience of hearing an electrifying pause in the middle of a sweeping musical movement? Time lengthens, tension builds, and thanks to science, next time you listen to a meaningful silence you’ll know that it does, after all, have a sound. It might not enter your ears, but that won’t stop it from speaking directly to your brain.

Science’s Beef With A Beard

Anne Casselman — 2008-03-05T18:31:00-06:00

Darwin had a big one. As did Plato and Aristotle. Pythagoras most certainly had one, a long one judging from his statue. Leonardo da Vinci’s grew to illustrious lengths later in life.

So why, if all these famous scientists had beards to stroke when being clever and contemplative, is sporting facial hair in the lab a big no-no? Well, it appears that facial hair provides a massive substrate on which bacteria can frolic and play. So much so that a bearded man wearing a face mask sheds significantly much more bacteria than a non-bearded man or woman. In fact the risk posed by the facial hair bacterial fallout is such that the authors of the February 2000 paper in Anaesthesia end their abstract with this line: Bearded males may also consider removing their beards. So it appears that a responsible doctor in this day and age should be sure to shave.

Not only does this run counter to the bearded examples set forth by such medical luminaries as Galer, Osling, Cushing and Freud but it also runs counter to the annals of history. A 16th century doctor by the name of Adrian Junius claimed that a beard provided protection against diseases.

And of course, there was the holy aspect. There had to be a good reason why God and Jesus failed to shave themselves, that didn’t come down to their busy schedules. Perhaps it was to protect themselves against throat illnesses, surmised one Victorian-era religious publication.

But anti-beard arguments also ran rife in pre-Victorian times: Beards trapped food and the stuff you spewed out when you sneezed. At a stretch, they could even go as far as to catch fire and trap vermin, some argued. This all came to a head in 1907, with a rather remarkable experiment. A French scientist took one bearded and one clean shaven man from the streets of Paris and asked each of them to kiss a woman, whose lips were previously swabbed with antiseptic. After each smooth, her lips were swabbed and the the cultures were smeared on agar. The hairy kiss, it turned out, was by far the more microbial-ly diverse.

Now this charming and simple experiment provides an objective and scientific argument against the beard but it was not always so. According to One Thousand Beards: A Cultural History of Facial Hair by Allan Peterkin the Chicago Chronicle wrote in 1903 that the average beard harboured 200,000 “misanthropic microbes.” It didn’t end there. Peterkin cites another instance where a New Jersey legislator tried to introduce a filthy whisker tax, following in Russia’s footsteps.

The Anti-Beard Brigade

Fast forward to 1967, when three scientists from the Industrial Health and Safety Office in Maryland tested their hypothesis that “a bearded man subjects his family and friends to risk of infection if his beard is contaminated by infectious microorganisms while he is working in a microbiological laboratory.” The result of their studies was a paper published in Applied Microbiology titled “Microbiological Laboratory Hazard of Bearded Men.”

And I must admit, it was creatively thorough in its methods. Part of the experiment consisted of exposing the natural hair beard of a mannequin (see photo) to a virus, then getting baby chicks to nestle their cute fluffy heads against the beard, and later killing them to see if they caught the virus from their stints of beard nuzzling. Two of the three chicks caught the disease.

Now I have to dwell on this for a second because who, in their right mind, other than some maniacal sick twisted scientists with an easter fetish, would hug baby chicks to his bristled cheek in the lab, like ever??? Maybe the moral isn’t to shave but to not rub your face against baby chicks. In which case one could take this a step further and say, don’t hire crazy bearded people in your lab.

Moving along. The other half of the experiment consisted of exposing four volunteers with 73 day old beards (why 73? it’s a prime number sure. But what significance does it have to facial hair growth? ) to bacteria, and seeing how well they retained the bacteria. Surprise, surprise, they retained much more bacteria than did plain simple skin. But what else is new?

There are other reasons why a beard is a risk in the modern day lab. For one, they get in the way of a tight seal on your respirator. And while the Occupational Safety and Health Administration doesn’t ban facial hair outright they do say that if a good seal on your respirator is thwarted because of facial hair it must be trimmed or removed. But really, let’s be honest. Of course facial hair breaks the seal. One study in the American Industry Hygiene Association Journal from 1984 (just think back to the hair that era saw...like Ben ‘Obi-Wan’ Kenobi’s respectful beard in “Return of the Jedi") found that men with facial hair saw a 246 fold drop in the protection offered by a half-mask respirator compared to the clean shaven men.

So Then Why Do Scientists Love Them So Much?

So where does this leave the populace? Well, John Curran, an anaesthetist at Nottingham City Hospital and Brian Pollard, a senior lecturer in anaesthesia at Manchester Royal Infirmary found themselves disagreeing over what a beard really meant; Curran asserts that “they are dirty, suiting woolly minded academics disinclined to arise for the morning ablutions” while Pollard “believes that beards, a natural state of affairs, signify wisdom”. So like any responsible scientist in a tiff, they conducted a controlled study and aired the results, and their debate in the December issue of the British Medical Journal.

They surveyed the attendees of a recent anaesthetic scientific meeting and found that 21 (34%) of 62 academics wore beards or moustaches, compared with only five of the 83 (6%) British National Health Service consultants. This results was statistically significant and it begged the question: why did academic anaesthetists shave less than their colleagues in the NHS?

The two authors look inward for an answer. After all, Pollard, an academic, sports a moustache while Curran, a shaver, is an NHS consultant. But all they find are age-old quotes that support both sides of the debate.

So perhaps it’s all about weighing the pros and cons. Or mitigating the risks your beard pose to those around you. Or frequently washing your beard. Or passing up the opportunity to nuzzle with chicks when you’re sick with a virus that can leap from humans to birds. Or deciding that yes, Santa Claus and Darwin both got something right, asides from sacks of toys and evolution.

Pros and Cons of Raw Milk: Part Deux

Anna Gosline — 2008-02-21T00:53:00-06:00

A follow-up on our first raw milk article, where we covered the infectious disease aspect.

So you’ve decided to brave the chance of contracting Listeria, E. coli, Salmonella and Campylobacter and find yourself some raw milk. But what are the real health benefits of drinking this unprocessed bovine beverage? In general, the benefits of raw milk break down into two camps: the real ones that that FDA and CDC would like you to ignore and the no-so-true ones advanced by a slightly zealous raw milk lobby.

Let’s start with the best documented of the raw milk health benefits: preventing allergies. For decades researchers had noted that kids who grew up on farms or had regular contact with farms were less likely to develop allergies. This observation falls in line with the “hygiene hypothesis” of allergy development – whereby our immune systems become bored and overactive in reaction to the “too-clean” modern environment, devoid of many of our healthy parasites and bacteria. Farms (with all their dirt and animals) are a rich sources of microbes that keep the immune system on track and steer it clear of allergies.

The same seems to hold true for just drinking raw milk. For example a 2007 study led by Marco Waser at the University of Basel in Switzerland found that European kids who drank raw milk early in life show decreased levels of asthma, sniffling, sneezing and watery eyes (rhinoconjunctivitis), food allergies, pollen allergies and horse allergies. This was independent of farm exposure.

Non-Industrial Farming Practices = Better

Raw milk is also often produced by grass-fed cows. Milk (and meat) from grass-fed cows contains more omega-3 fatty acids - health boon for heart, brain and belly. It also has higher levels of conjugated linoelic acid (CLA). CLA is a type of fatty acid found in milk and meat products that has been shown - in clinical trials and animal experiments – to aid weight loss (it’s a popular dietary supplement, but watch those side effects, eh?), protect against diabetes and heart disease and fight various forms of cancer. Good stuff here. But again, this is a function of what the cows eat and heat processing milk already high in CLA does not affect levels. Raw milk producers also often stick to the organic system, too.

More of the Good Stuff that Makes Kids Grow?

Heating milk may also reduce the amount of some vitamin and minerals - although the actual dietary significance can be hard to determine. For example, one 1939 by Warren Woessner at the University of Madison, Wisconsin found that pasteurized milk sometimes had less than 50% of the vitamin C of particularly rich raw milk samples. Indeed the pasteurization of milk is generally believed to be responsible for the emergence of infantile scurvy (check this 2001 review from Kumaravel Rajakumar at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine). However, other than infants no one relies on milk as their major food source, and few rely on it as their major vitamin C source (the richest sources from the above paper averaged about 25 mg/liter of milk. So I’d have to drink 3 liters of milk daily to get my 75 mg of recommended vitamin C. Or one cup of orange juice).

Heat processing may also affect the bioavailability of some other vitamins, but I haven’t seen any papers that blow my socks off. Likewise there is little evidence to suggest that heated milk has less calcium or less bioavailable calcium. For example a 1978 study on raw versus boiled human breast milk found that underweight babies grew fatter faster on raw milk and absorbed more nitrogen but not more calcium.

Yet raw milk might just be better in terms of general growth and goodness. For example, in 1931 a study of 17,000 Lanarkshire children conducted for the Department of Health for Scotland and published in Nature found that children given a 3/4 of a pint of raw milk daily grew slight more in weight and height than that the kids given pasteurized milk (both did much better than the control kids given no milk). For example, boys aged 5-11 gained an average of 12.81 ounces on pasteurized milk and 13.88 ounces on raw milk over the study months. Boys grew 0.79 inches on pasteurized milk and 0.83 on raw. Of course they don’t include any statistical tests, so I can’t really tell you how significant these differences are (if I had the raw data, I’d t-test it for you).

Now one could argue that you can get the same health benefits of raw milk (with fewer risks) by drinking milk from an organic dairy that only grass-feeds its cows, while also taking a multivitamin and forcing your kids to spend a shite load of time at the petting zoo in the first years of their life. Of course that’s your call.

Not So Real Raw Milk Benefits

Now let’s briefly turn our attention to the health claims that are NOT generally supported by medical evidence, just to clear up a few misconceptions. As a starter, let me quote you a passage from an oft-cited source. It’s from the May 8th 1937 issue of the Lancet, from their political discourse sections. While it’s clear that some of observations below are likely grounded in real mechanisms, you must remember that this is not a study. This is not a controlled trial. And this matters. For your reading pleasure:

“The Diseases of Animals Committee said that if vitamin C was destroyed it could be returned by giving the children lime-juice or orange-juice. Did their lordships think that in the poorer parts of our great cities the children were going to get orange juice or lime-juice whenever they got a glass of milk ? The loss in the milk through pasteurisation was first in vitamin C, the loss of which caused scurvy, and secondly, in vitamin D, a loss which caused rickets. The chief medical officer of Dr. Barnardo’s Homes, Dr. A. H. Macdonald, had made an exhaustive study of this subject and had come to the following conclusions: (a) The child on raw milk is very fit. (b) Chilblains are practically eliminated. (c) The teeth are less likely to decay. (d) The resistance to tuberculosis and other infections is raised. (e) In one of his homes containing 750 delicate boys who were fed on raw milk for five years, only one case of non-pulmonary tuberculosis occurred, while in the preceding five years with similar types of children fed on pasteurised milk fourteen cases of nonpulmonary tuberculosis occurred.”

Another old study (and here the age shows in its inaccuracies) is the cat feeding trials of one Dr. Francis Pottenger, a TB doctor working in Southern California. In 1932, after noticing the health problems of many of the cats donated to his hospital for research and hormone extraction, Pottenger decided to do a series of controlled feeding trials testing the difference between raw and cooked milk/meat diets. He found that cats given cooked milk and meat (in various proportions) suffered gravely from many illnesses including visual deficits, lower survival and weight of kittens, higher numbers of stillbirths, neurological problems and abnormal limb development. Those on the all raw diet (also the only of the 5 diets to have more meat than milk) did grand.

However, these are all likely signs of taurine deficiency as described by this 1986 paper. Unlike humans, cats are obligate carnivores. They cannot synthesize the amino acid taurine, which is degraded when meat is cooked. Humans can. This was not known at the time of Pottenger’s study and thus he concluded that cats should only eat raw food and suggested that humans do likewise. In fact, he fed his tuberculosis patients lots of healthy, raw, fresh foods at his sanatorium in Monrovia, which probably did them much good. Ironically, TB is one of the diseases that humans can catch from drinking raw milk and indeed one child died recently via that route.

Various advocates claim that raw milk can cure cancer, heart disease and joint stiffness (based on a 1944 study comparing raw and heated cream in guinea pigs...). Hmm, okay sure. Many raw milk supporters still refer to the 1970s studies of Kurt Oster who suggested that homogenization breaks apart the enzyme xanthine oxidase (XO) into smaller particles that can be absorbed through the intestinal wall and invade arteries and cause heart disease. This was later disproved.

A Problem of All Milk, Hot or Not

Eliminating milk proteins (such as casein) might help calm symptoms of autism according to a 2004 paper from the Cochrane Database Review. However, there is no research implicating the pasteurization process itself. If anything, different genetic variants of beta-casein have been linked to heart disease, autism and schizophrenia, but there is little consensus in the research community about these.

Pasteurized milk is often suggested to be “more allergenic.” While, as mentioned above, raw milk might help stave off allergies, heated or homogenized milk has never been shown to be more allergenic in itself.

Deeper Milky Thoughts

It’s pretty clear that drinking raw milk carries some elevated risk of serious infection. It’s also clear that raw milk is somewhat, if not a lot, better for you [though I might argue that the greatest improvements lie in the fact that raw milk producers also tend to be organic and only grass-feed their cows]. The problem lies in exactly HOW risky and exactly HOW much healthier is the milk, thereby allowing us to decide whether to drink it, or the government to decide whether to allow us to drink it.

To me, the evidence certainly suggests that raw milk shouldn’t be banned. But I do worry that the current craze for raw milk, and the underground nature of its sales, could reduce quality standards. Raw milk supporters often claim that pasteurization is just an excuse for dirty dairy practices. Fair enough. But when demands for raw milk reach mainstream, will all the raw milkers be able to keep their growing herds so clean and healthy?

Material Science: Valentine’s day gifts for your lady scientist

Anne Casselman — 2008-02-13T20:50:00-06:00

Oppenheimer tote bag $15. Dude. The design features a portrait J. Robert Oppenheimer, in profile, depicted with the mushroom cloud of an atomic bomb blast behind him & his famous quote followed by his signature. Iconography has never been so hot.

Ethanol wine glasses set of four, $64, from Molecular Muse. Perfect to enjoy some champagne, post-post modern stylez.

CHEMISTRY: A Screen Printed Artist Book about Science and Attraction, $22. It’s a small artful accordion book that spends 10 pages dwelling on the chemistry of attraction from Blue Valentine Press.

Sterling silver chromosome pendant, $80, from Bronze Girl. It’s beautiful. It’s a chromosome. And it’s shiny! What more does a girl want?

Then - well ok it’s a bit late to start this knitting project but maybe for next year - there’s the mobius shawl that you can knit for your loved one. After all, what say I love you more than the symbol for infinity coupled with the patience of knuckling down and knitting that much yarn into a garment??. Here’s the pattern. If you want a shortcut, for $40 you can buy a magenta one knit out of acrylic over at Etsy: Mobius magenta shawl.

And finally for those who want to put things baldly, there are the countless fertility pouches that Stitch PIxie sells that feature egg and sperm and ovaries all sewn on in vinyl. Perfect for storing tampons, birth control (which would make it the anti-fertillity pouch), what have you ($12-$25 depending on design). There’s even a naughty, but strangely unerotic, vulva one.

Columbus’ Sailors Culprit for Syphilis Epidemic

Anne Holden — 2008-02-07T20:14:00-06:00

What do Howard Hughes, Ivan the Terrible, Hitler, and Oscar Wilde have in common? Each is suspected of suffering from the infamous venereal disease syphilis. They all had some of the symptoms, most often insanity, or documentation of treatment, such as mercury in the blood, and all led particularly “active” lifestyles. And now geneticists have finally solved the mystery of where syphilis originated by comparing its genes with those of its closely related bacteria.

For the past 40 years, there have been three theories floating around as to how and when syphilis made its first appearance in Europe. The first theory, called the Columbian Theory, proposes that Columbus and his crew (along with other Spanish and Portuguese explorers) contracted syphilis from the Native Americans in the New World, and then brought it back with them to Europe. This seems to fit with some evidence, as the first big outbreak was in Naples in 1495, and many have tied the appearance of this new disease in Europe to the return of the Portuguese and Spanish explorers.

The second theory argues the opposite. Appropriately called the Pre-Columbian Theory, supporters of this argument propose that syphilis was present in Europe and the Middle East for thousands of years, it’s just that everyone called it something else: leprosy. Both leprosy and syphilis cause unsightly skin sores that could have been easily confused. But as the study of medicine advanced, doctors began to realize that leprosy and syphilis were distinct, hence the sudden appearance of syphilis on the medical radar in the late 1400s. There is some support for this theory as well, as many Biblical and Classical accounts of leprosy describe symptoms that are closer to syphilis. Roman crusaders also refer to using a mercury-based ointment for treating leprosy – though mercury is only an appropriate treatment for syphilis.

Not to be outdone, a third theory that brings together the previous two has also been developed. Called the Combination Theory, this one argues that the bacteria that causes syphilis is very old, originating in the Paleolithic (several hundred thousand years ago), and traveled into the New World with the first human groups, eventually developing into the sexually transmitted disease we all know today. It was thus picked up by Columbus and his crew in the late 15th century and transported back to Europe. Meanwhile, a different strain of the bacteria stayed in the Old World, manifesting itself in Africa as the skin disease ‘yaws.’

All these theories rely on historical and anthropological evidence (syphilis distorts bones in characteristic ways), and no one had yet taken a look at origins of syphilis from a genetics perspective. So Kristen Harper and her team at Emory University decided to take on that task. In January 15, 2008 issue of PLOS: Neglected Tropical Diseases, Harper and her colleagues looked at the group bacteria that causes syphilis, yaws and several other skin diseases, a genus called Treponesmatoses

The team sequenced 26 species of bacteria. After studying genetic differences in these strains and compiling a tree of their ages and relatedness, it would appear that the Combination Theory is the most spot-on of the three choices. Harper and her team discovered that the strain of bacteria we know as syphilis does trace back to the New World, while weaker, non-sexually transmitted strains are much older and trace back to the Old World.

So, it would seem that we can finally confirm that it wasn’t just the avocados and pineapples that made their way back from the New World after Columbus’ voyage. Though we can say they are decidedly the more pleasant cargo.

Girl Guides Do Science!

Stephanie Gower — 2008-01-31T19:44:00-06:00

It’s Monday night and I’ve just gone and asked my Girl Guides what they think of when they hear the words “science” or “scientists”. We go around the circle as they free associate, somewhat harshly: “Potions and bubbles,” “White jackets,” “Mixing chemicals,” “No fun,” “People with glasses.” “Hair tied back and lab coats,” “Purple, and grey hair”.

“Ugly people, and people with glasses” says Victoria. “Thick glasses”, someone clarifies. Suddenly, Dalia remembers about science class at school, and the girls list heat, condensation, optics, gas (“farts”, I hear someone whisper before the group dissolves into giggles), electricity, liquids, and methane.

“Did you know that you are sitting with two scientists right now”? I ask. Victoria covers her mouth with her hands and looks distressed. “I wouldn’t have said ugly if I knew that”.

Girl Guides of Canada have offered increasing numbers of science-related badges over its history: a conservation badge was established by 1959, a weather badge was introduced in 1968, the ecologist badge made its way into the program in 1975, and an endangered species badge showed up in the 1990s. Still, most of the badges added to the program since the 1930s focus on biology - the physical sciences were neglected when it came to the medallions of embroidery on our sashes.

That all changed a couple years ago with the introduction of the physics, chemistry, and engineering badges, as well as the first badge ever to be called simply, “science”. Needless to say my not-so-inner science nerd was giddy at this discovery. Before you could say “Paracelsus”, my nine to 11 year-old Guides had earned the new chemistry badge by solving a “mystery” using coffee-filter chromatography, invisible lemon-juice ink, and some pH strips I wrangled from a postdoctoral chemist friend. The quest for the physics badge was next.

The Science Girl Guides Did Way Back When

I wonder if the new badges signified a switch in the organization’s enthusiasm for doing science with the girls. When I first contact Catherine Miller, who runs the archives at Guides Canada’s National Office, she isn’t sure of the science content of the early program. But she’s eager to help me find out, digging out all the resources that have been available to Canadian girl guides since the organization came to Canada around 1910.

At the archives, I’m having trouble figuring out which parts of the early program fall under the rubric of “science”. A 1912 book called How Girls can help to build up the Empire the Handbook for Girl Guides, includes sections on “animals, nature and plants, as well as observation of signs, spooring…”, and “sanitation, nursing, invalid foods, and stoorkeeping”. The book, which was written by the sibling founders of Boy Scouts and Girl Guides, Lord Baden-Powell and his sister, Agnes, is organized into chapters titled “Finding the Injured” and “Tending the Injured”, but it’s clear that girls would have to understand biology, physiology, and math.

A 1920 publication called Girl Guide Badges and How to Win them compiled by Mrs. Janson Potts, Director of Camps includes over 75 badges. It’s a fascinating compilation of seemingly random skills – girls could earn badges called Bell-ringer, Cobbler, Commonwealth Knowledge, or Gymnast. Then there is the laundry list of traditional womanly badges: Embroideress, Lace maker, Hostess, Homemaker, and Domestic Service.

But there’s also an Air Mechanic’s badge which requires girls to have an elementary knowledge of the principles upon which an aeroplane engine operates, and an Astronomer’s badge which required girls to understand the nature and movement of stars, identify six principle constellations, find the north star using stars other than the pole star, tell the hour of the night using stars and moon, and understand the relative positions and movement of earth, sun and moon.

To earn the Electrician’s badge girls had to be able to make a simple electro-magnet, repair broken connections, know methods of rescue and resuscitation of persons suffering from shock, and understand the action of simple cells and bells.

The Geology badge required knowledge of the periods in the formation of the earth’s crust, and what is meant by stratification, dip, and faults. They also had to be able to identify twenty different minerals in their natural state, identify twenty different fossils, and the period to which they belonged, and collect six specimens of minerals or rocks, or six fossils.

Needless to say, the early science badges seem strict and extensive culminating in an overall impression of hardcore that is rare today. Miller shows me an early copy of the Guide promise and law indicating that one of the four “signposts” of Guiding is “Intelligence through progressive tests” (the others were handcraft, health, and service). By the 1990s, the program was focused on ”Fun, Friendship and Adventure” and the newest book for the girls is called “Guides on the Go!” “The aims of the organization have changed,” points out Miller.

Girl Guide Science Badges Nowadays: More Diverse & More Fun

A close comparison reveals that although the geology and electrician badges have vanished, astronomy and air mechanics still exist, as does a naturalist badge that was introduced in the 1930s. The basic requirements hadn’t changed much since they were introduced despite rapid changes in society. Nowadays countless activities compete for girls’ time and so various media compete for their attention (hence the “Guides on the Go!” perhaps). I wondered if my girls could remain focused for long enough to complete the type of badge work that used to be required.

Lucky for me, science sometimes works like a magic trick. One night I set out a milk bottle, some paper, and a hard-boiled egg. I light the paper on fire and stick it into the bottle. “Ooohh, smoke!!” I place the egg on top. The girls are all squished in as close to the jar as they can get: “It’s stretching!” “NO it’s not,” “I don’t see anything.”

For a moment I think the experiment isn’t going to work. Then, with an audible Pop! the egg slides into the bottle. The amazement in the room is palpable. I sense that in the girls’ opinion, this is one of the best things I have ever shown them. What just happened, I ask them.

“It’s like sweat”, says Victoria, “like the egg is sweating from the heat and it gets slippery and slides into the bottle”.

“Heat”, says Dalia.

“It’s because of the smoke”, they all say.

I’d love to know how many Canadian Guides are doing the science badges. At the Toronto Area store, I’m told that most badges are sold in about equal amounts, and I feel confident that most other leaders I’ve met would be at ease explaining friction. So why do I still stereotype my organization as being full of older women who are more comfortable making scrapbooks than möbius strips? It’s not as if doing things the hard way stopped Guide leaders in the past – after all, Guides was created after a group of adventurous girls demanded entry to the adventurous boys-only Scouting program in 1909. Today, many Guiders are young women who would not have felt out of place in their science classes.

Plus many basic science experiments didn’t take much. An experiment about surface tension took three ingredients: take a dish of milk, add food colouring, followed by detergent. “Can we drink the milk afterwards?” asks Victoria.

Although the instructions call for a couple of drops, Magda squirts in a stream of detergent. The colours immediately vanish into thin lines at the edge of the dish. Victoria reads out the explanation of what’s happening and complains that their colours are not “zooming and swirling” like the description says. The girls stare at it for about eight seconds before asking if they can add more detergent. Soon Dalia has found a bit of leftover cardboard and is stirring. I remind myself that this is all experimentation; they’re learning and they are interested in what will happen.

What happens is a horrible uniform green colour. “It looks like vomit”, says Dalia. I make a face, and say, “My vomit is not that colour”. She says, “Neither is mine. It looks like old man vomit. Can we play a game?”

The opportunity to do science may not strike my girls as being anything special. After all, we now live in an age of apparent equal rights for women and rapid technological advances. But they love doing experiments – and in this girls-only environment, they clearly feel comfortable enough to say what they want and participate fully.

The girls in Stephanie’s Girl Guide unit recently completed the requirements for the physics badge.

Links of interest:

Girl Guides of Canada – Guides du Canada

Way fun science experiments you can do at home:
The Edible/Inedible Experiments Archive

The Amazing Physics of Everyday Objects
Physics Experiments from the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation

Annnnnd the best silly putty recipe ever:

Dissolve 1 tablespoon of borax in ½ cup of water. Put 1 tablespoon of white glue and 1 tablespoon of water into a plastic cup and stir. When the glue and water are mixed well, add 1 tablespoon of the borax solution and stir.

Is There Room for Meat in a Green Diet?

Melinda Wenner — 2008-01-17T15:10:00-06:00

Winter is the time of year when I like to wear boots, watch movies and eat lots of meat. Truth be told, I like meat in the fall, spring and summer too, but a duck cassoulet or a filet mignon just seems that much more satisfying when it’s freezing out, non?

Sometimes, though, with a belly full of beef, I get a nagging feeling. I’ve heard that meat is one of the most energy and land-use intensive foods a person can eat, so perhaps my winter eating habits aren’t ideal – for neither waist nor environment. Should I replace steaks with salads for the greater good of the planet? What is the most ecologically friendly meal, anyway?

As I’ve learned over the last few weeks, there is no prescription for a perfect ecological meal – there are many (many!) unanswered questions about how different foods and farming practices impact the environment. But we could stand to follow three general guidelines: 1. Eat more fruit and vegetables, especially locally grown ones. 2. Yes (sniffle), eat less meat, and fewer processed foods. 3. Overall, think about eating less, period.

The energy we get from everything we eat, whether lettuce or corn, fish or beef, originates from the sun. Plants transform solar energy via photosynthesis; cows eat grass (or corn), the products of this solar energy; we eat cows. But if we left food production entirely to nature, we wouldn’t have enough to sustain ourselves – so we turn to agriculture, which uses various tactics like irrigation, fertilization and pesticides to maximize the amount of solar energy that is captured, harvested and assimilated in our foods.

The problem is that these tactics are very energy intensive – fertilizers are essentially fossil fuels, for example – so while agriculture may maximize yield, it also maximizes energy and water use and leaves behind a trail of chemicals and nutritionally depleted soil. Corn produced using standard agricultural practices uses four times more energy per hectare than corn grown using manpower alone, for instance. Indeed, half of America’s land, 80 percent of its fresh water, and 17 percent of the fossil fuels Americans use go toward producing food.

(Although fish are not part of our standard agricultural system, there are certainly environmental issues surrounding them, too – such as how the fish are harvested and how far they travel to get to you, notes Gail Feenstra, a Food Systems Analyst at the UC Davis Agricultural Sustainability Institute.)

Generally, the higher up on the food chain you go – from plants to animals, say – the bigger the energy trail that is left behind by their production. This is because one has to account for not only what went into raising the animal you are eating, but also what went into producing its food (and cows eat a lot: the U.S. livestock population consumes seven times more grain than Americans do themselves). In addition, as we know from the first two laws of thermodynamics, energy transfer from one form to another is never 100% efficient. As you move up the food chain from green plants to, say, cows, lots of energy is lost along the way: for every kilogram of animal protein in a steak, your delicious cow had to eat about 6 kilograms of grain protein (or about 12 kg of total grain).

Now for a caveat: a little meat isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Ruminant livestock like cows, goats and sheep can be grown on land that’s unsuitable for other crops, and they can also be fed byproducts such as soybean meal, so diets that include some meat may feed more people than vegetarian diets alone, according to a 2007 study published in Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems. This study was considering both grass-fed and corn-fed cows; it’s important to note that even corn-fed cows are typically raised on grass as calves and while no one has directly compared corn to grass-fed cows, many argue that grass-raised beef leaves a smaller ecological footprint.

That said, we certainly don’t need to eat as much meat as we do today. On average, Americans eat more than five ounces of cooked meat and eggs per day, and while no one knows exactly how much meat consumption would optimize our land usage, it’s probably more like two ounces.

We could also do without so many processed foods. Walk down your typical grocery store aisle and most of what you’ll see – with the exception of the aforementioned fruits, veggies and raw meats – has been heavily processed. Whether the food has added sugars or fats, has been morphed into a nugget or has been freeze-dried, processing requires additional resources, which means – you guessed it – it leaves a bigger environmental footprint.

It would also help to eat more locally than we do. “Try to find ways of buying from as close to home as possible,” suggests Joan Gussow, a writer, food producer and professor emeritus of nutrition and education at Columbia University Teacher’s College. That doesn’t mean going to the McDonald’s a mile down the road, though. Shopping at the farmer’s market rather than the supermarket will coax you to eat fewer unprocessed foods, and it may help minimize greenhouse gas emissions since the foods you’re eating haven’t been trucked across the country. It’s especially good if the local food you buy is organic, since organic farming doesn’t use pesticides and leaves the soil in better shape.

Some sources, however, challenge the idea that local and organic is always good. Indeed, a massive UK government-sponsored review of the environmental impacts of food production and consumption found that, when attempting to follow energy costs for the entire product life cycle, organic meat farming was sometimes “worse” for the environment (organic agriculture was definitely better, though).

The report found that under UK conditions organic chicken and beef required more energy than conventional methods. In contrast, organic pig and sheep farming required less than conventional farming. Likewise, the efficiency of mass food transport in the UK means that buying local isn’t necessarily a shortcut to good environmental decisions. The University of Manchester authors suggest that walking to the store, instead of driving, will probably make the most significant dent in your carbon dioxide food bills.

Finally, our planet would be a lot happier if we just ate less. On average, Americans tend to eat 3790 calories every day, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. We need a lot less than that. A moderately active 30-year-old woman needs about 2,000 calories a day; a similar man needs 2,600. “If you eat more food than you need, then we have to produce more food that you didn’t need,” points out Christian Peters, a postdoctoral associate in crop and soil sciences at Cornell University. “It doesn’t make sense for the environment. It doesn’t make sense for your health, either.”

Alas, what does this mean for yours truly, the Biggest Beef-o-Phile in Brooklyn? Sadly, I’ll admit, I could do with less meat and more fruits and veggies on my plate. At least I can pat myself on the back for not eating THAT many processed foods – I haven’t had a McNugget in 15 years, and I don’t eat cereal for breakfast. But then, wait: beer is a processed food, isn’t it?

Less meat AND less beer? This is going to be a tougher winter than I thought.

WHY GRAINS ARE GREENER THAN GRISTLE
ENERGY: Eleven times more energy is required to make a calorie of beef protein than a calorie of grain protein.
WATER: When compared pound for pound, animal production requires at least 100 times more water than grain.
LAND USE: Beef requires 31 times more land area than the equivalent quantity of grain.

HOW MUCH ENERGY (IN CALORIES) IS REQUIRED TO MAKE A SINGLE CALORIE OF MEAT?
(from the September 2003 issue of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition)
Lamb: 57 calories (~ 29 if pasture fed only)
Beef: 40 calories (~20 if pasture fed only)
Pigs: 14 calories
Turkeys: 10 calories
Broiler chickens: 4 calories

Alternatively…

HOW MUCH ENERGY (IN MEGAJOULES) IS REQUIRED TO MAKE A SINGLE KILOGRAM OF MEAT?
(from the UK Department of Environmental, Food and Rural Affairs 2006 “Shopping Trolley” report)
Beef: 28 MJ
Lamb: 23 MJ (organic lamb: 18 MJ)
Pork: 17 MJ
Chicken: 12 MJ (organic chicken: 16 MJ)

Climate Change Anxiety Disorder: On the street or in my head?

Anne Casselman — 2008-01-17T00:24:00-06:00

Late last summer I had a nightmare whereby climate change ruined my life. Apparently, climate change stresses me out and this was my brain’s way of sounding the alarm. It went something like this:

I was house hunting. In overpriced housing bubbly Vancouver. And finally, of all miracles I found the perfect property. It was part of a fictional neighbourhood that was truly up and coming. There, I found an empty beachfront lot. It was cheap and I was elated. That is until I realized that within the next fifty years my perfect happy home would be ever so slightly submerged by rising sea levels. This dampened my future floorboards and hopes. I woke up crestfallen and blue.

Gore help me, my climate change anxiety was large enough to take root in my subconscious and sprout in my dreams. But the real question was whether my nightmare was a symptom of a greater collective anxiety in our society.

So I coined my affliction “Climate Change Anxiety Disorder” and began to research whether there was any evidence to legitimize my newly minted malady.

There is very little doubt that climate change itself will trigger numerous mental maladies. Climate-related natural disasters displace families, screw over their homes, and can have long lasting effects on their levels of anxiety and depression.

As a case in point, the incidence of mental illness doubled in the survivors of Hurricane Katrina in the months following the disaster. Meanwhile Australia is currently experiencing the worst drought it’s suffered in over a millennium and rural farmers are taxed. The mental health organization Beyond Blue found that a drought-stricken Australian farmer commits suicide every four days, twice that of the national average. On the other end of the spectrum, flood victims were similarly distraught in 1997 during the Red River flood.

By 2080 some 4.5 million UK citizens will face a serious risk of flooding. The International Futures Forum’s report on the relationship between climate change and mental health forecasts that the mental health of these citizens will be weighed down by the flooding events themselves, together with the economic stress of insurance withdrawals and difficulty selling houses. So yes, climate change spells mental gloom.

But my real question was whether the anticipation of its effects alone could tax our psyches.

“I don’t have nightmares, but I do lash out at people,” says Jason, who runs a VoIP phone company in Vancouver. He admitted to assuming the worst was in store (“everything will go to hell”). Hence his reaction to those that waste resources: “If a hummer goes by I want to blow it up.”

But others are finding the psychological green landscape a bit more zen. “I don’t hear as much “the sky is falling” stuff as I used to,” says Trevor, a web developer.

And then there’s the guilt. “I feel cognitive dissonance between climate change and my strong desire to burn fossil fuels,” admits Jonathan, who runs a software company in town.

When doomsday felt nigh, back at the height of the Cold War, many school children didn’t think they’d make it to adulthood. The chronic fear of nuclear war was coined “nuclear anxiety” and it was pervasive. No wonder kids back then were reported as being unmotivated and wracked with despair. It’s altogether possible that global warming may take a similar toll on our psyches.

Richard Kefford, Professor of Medicine at the University of Sydney, is quick to point out in an article published in The Medical Journal of Australia last year that the human response to overwhelming catastrophes is denial, despondency and paralyzing helplessness.

And frankly, what could possibly constitute “overwhelming catastrophe” better than climate change?

Now I couldn’t find any medical terms coined to describe this climate change doom and gloom. But I did find a term that is used to describe the distress caused by witnessing a change or transformation of one’s home. The man who coined the term, a philosopher at the University of Newcastle in Australia, Glenn Albrecht, likened it to being homesick at home. You yourself haven’t aren’t going anywhere, but the stable environment you grew up in is.

So perhaps I’m not so much anxious as suffering from solastalgia.

So what can I do? Mostly, chill out. I recounted my so-called “nightmare” to a (productively utilitarian) climate change scientist friend who reassured me that 50 centimeters of sea level rise in the next century shouldn’t pose a serious threat to my nesting instincts. If I was truly worried she suggested that I check the climate change forecasts before investing in property or hunkering down somewhere.

Sure enough the Sierra Club released a Google Earth program that shows how much of Vancouver’s mainland will be underwater with sea level rise. Perhaps I should get into the dike business.

Of Stress and Periods

Anne Holden — 2008-01-09T02:17:01-06:00

One of my college friends spent a year abroad in Australia as a teenager. I was, of course, extraordinarily jealous. However, as we talked more about her experience, she mentioned a very strange side effect of her trip Down Under. While living Sydney she didn’t have her ‘monthly visitor’ for the entire year. “A whole year?” I said, “Were you ill or something?” To which she replied, “No I wasn’t ill or anything, but I think was just stressed with the move down there and everything, at least that’s what my doctor said.”

As it turns out, my friend is not the only one to experience irregular or skipped menstrual cycles for seemingly strange reasons. In fact, it has long been assumed among doctors and fertility specialists that stress can lead to missed periods. This becomes particularly important with couples who are having problems conceiving. As a result, researchers have conducted countless studies to see if there is a link between stress and ovulation. Some have proposed that psychological counseling may have a positive effect on fertility.

However, the studies themselves have brought mixed results. For example, a 2000 study by Alice Domar and colleagues at Harvard Medical School found a causal link between psychological counseling and increased fertility. Yet another study by Lisbeth Anderheim and colleagues at Gotberg University, also in 2000, found the opposite. Of course periods themselves are slightly mysterious, in that we still don’t really know why humans bother to have them at all.

The mixed results could stem from the difference between psychological stress and physiological stress. It is common knowledge that women who are having physical health problems often stop ovulating; missed periods are a well-known side-effect of anorexia and some forms of cancer. The onset of ovulation can also be affecting by social environments. But what about psychological stress? Can that affect ovulation and fertility as well?

To answer this question, a team of anthropologists at Harvard University, led by Peter Ellison, decided to test women for changes in ovulation who were going through a very stressful time in their lives: preparing for the MCAT. The MCAT, or the Medical College Admission Test, is the exam taken for all those hoping to enter medical school. It takes over nine hours to complete and requires months of preparation. A good score can mean admission into a great medical school. A bad score is doom. A stressful time indeed.

So Ellison examined female juniors at Harvard who were preparing for the MCAT and compared their anxiety levels (and ovulation schedules) to women who were not preparing for the MCAT. In order to make sure there were no other factors at play, all the women were otherwise physically healthy, were not using any oral contraceptive pill that would change hormone levels, and all reported normal ovulation.

The testing consisted of both sets of subjects completing questionnaires about their perceived stress and anxiety levels, as well as having the subjects monitor their menstrual cycle. In addition, daily saliva samples were taken to test for changes in hormone levels, which are often indicators of physiological stress.

The results were, in many cases, unsurprising. As one would expect, the subjects who were preparing for the MCAT reported an increased level of stress and anxiety leading up to the exam that was much greater than the control subjects. However, this stress seemed purely psychological, as there were no significant changes in hormone levels indicative of physical stress.

But despite the significant increase in stress, there was no change in ovulation or periods in either group. No matter how stressed these students were about the upcoming exam, they continued to have a visit from Aunt Flow right on schedule. This was even the case during the final days and weeks leading up to the MCAT exam, when the subjects described intense stress levels that only Harvard pre-meds can sustain. The study was published in the December 2007 issue of the American Journal of Physical Anthropology.

So what does this mean for the connection between psychological stress and missing periods? According to Ellison’s study, this connection is likely non-existent. As mentioned above, physiological stress that results from malnutrition, or even extreme anxiety levels that occur during life-threatening situations, could lead to changes in ovulation, says Ellison. But it would seem that otherwise healthy individuals cannot automatically claim that ‘stress’ is the cause of their continued missed periods; there must be some other physical cause.

As for my friend who traveled to Australia, I can only speculate that there was some other explanation for her missed periods…probably having to do with everything being upside down in the southern hemisphere.

Raw Milk…clean and healthy?

Anna Gosline — 2007-12-19T02:19:00-06:00

One of my officemates used to date a nutritionist. A nutritionist who has given him some interesting ideas about health foods, including apple cider vinegar and raw milk.

Now Officemate is lactose intolerant, as are many adults of Asian extraction, meaning that he lacks the ability to synthesize the intestinal enzyme lactase and cannot break down milk sugar into its digestible bits, galactose and glucose. Officemate claimed that raw milk is digestible by dairy belly-achin’ folks like him because – miracle of nature! – it contains lactase. Naturally.

My interest piqued, I began to explore the science of raw milk versus commercial milk. How does pasteurization and homogenization affect the disease, nutritional, allergic and intolerance profile of dairy?

Into the literature I plowed and found, well, a lot. Firstly there are a growing number advocacy groups, such as The Campaign for Real Milk, which extol the virtues of raw milk, sometimes a wee bit past what the evidence truly finds. Cures allergies! Puts the kibosh on arthritis! Pasteurization kills babies!

And then, of course we have the FDA and other health organizations that wish to wipe raw milk clean off the planet. Sure it might be marginally better for you, but why risk terrifying bacterial infections? Intriguingly, the FDA has created a Power Point presentation to highlight just how bad raw milk is and the Real Milk Campaign has shot back with its response - references included.

I’ve read every paper I could get my hands on and, honestly, both sides seems a little crazed to me. And crazy hardly ever leads to the whole truth.

Indeed the can of worms is so large I’ll be reporting this in two parts. Today we’ll cover the claims over the cleanliness of raw milk and lactose intolerant digestion. Coming up – allergies, autism, nutritional and vitamin differences between “real” milk and the crap we buy in stores.

The Basics

Let’s start with the basics. Homogenization is a process where milk fat globules are forced through tiny pipes, which breaks up said fat into tiny pieces and prevents the cream from floating to the top.

Pasteurization is the heating of milk to sub-boiling temperatures in a bid to kill off the bad bugs without totally ruining the taste and texture (though of course some would find this statement debatable). There are two ways to pasteurize: normal/classic pasteurization, where milk is heated to 63C for 30 minutes or the high temp short time (HTST) method, where milk is raised to 72 degrees for 15 seconds.

Both methods dramatically reduce the number of disease-causing bacteria, including Campylobacter, Escherichia, Listeria, Salmonella, Yersinia, and Brucella, that are often present in milk. Bad. According to the CDC, more than 300 people in the United States got sick from drinking raw milk or eating cheese made from raw milk in 2001, and nearly 200 became ill from these products in 2002.

This is a mere fraction of national food borne illness – in 2006 there were 1.4 million cases of Salmonella alone – but the FDA argues that it’s enough to warrant suggesting that people do not consume raw milk.

Clean Clean Clean

But many supporters of raw milk point to the fact that raw milk kills bad bacteria all on its own. Which sounds like a load of pants, but it’s sort of true. For example, one 1982 study by Doyle and Roman at the University of Wisconsin-Madison found that Campylobacter jejuni (bad) survived longer in pasteurized milk than it did in raw milk. After about 8 days, most of the bacteria had died in raw, but it took around 14 days to get the same result in pasteurized milk.

Likewise a 1977 study by J. E. Ford from the National Institute for Research in Dairying found that - in human milk - E. coli grew slower in raw versus pasteurized milk, though total levels were roughly the same for both classic pasteurization and HTST after 6 hours.

So raw milk is indeed better than pasteurized milk at fending off bad bacteria. The reason is that heat treatment can kill off good bacteria and denature helpful proteins. One such protein is lactoferrin, a natural milk molecule which is currently being used by some companies as part of an antibacterial product in food manufacturing. But unfortunately, it is heat sensitive: in the 1977 Ford study the authors found that heating human milk above 70C (albeit for 15 minutes) destroyed pretty much all the lactoferrin. Heating to 63C killed off about 65%.

Another potentially good thing ruined by milk processing is xanthine oxidase (XO). In a recent paper from the UK medical journal The Lancet, researchers found that XO in human milk produces nitric oxide, which then hampers the growth of Salmonella and E. coli. According to a 1977 report from the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service, raw milk has more than three times the concentration of XO than processed milk: about 110 micrograms (u) per liter versus 34 ug/l.

Next we have the lactoperoxidase enzyme, which also has potent antibacterial properties. Classic pasteurization cuts down activity by 16%, and HTST by 30% (up to 80% in buffalo milk) though this seems to be an adequate fraction. According to a 2001 study by N.E. Marks at the University of Reading, HTST milk could still do a decent job in quelling bacterial growth. Pasteurization at 80C did denature the enzyme and they found the milk spoil faster.

And lastly we have lysozyme, which again has proven antibacterial power. One 1986 paper by Griffiths and often cited by the FDA found that pasteurization left 70% of lysozyme intact in cow’s milk. A more recent analysis of heat-treatment on buffalo milk found that after both normal and HTST pasteurization, the lysozyme was pretty much nuked.

So overall, pasteurization does indeed decrease the content of natural bacteria-fighting compounds. And that is not even including the added influence of good bacteria, which may out compete the bad bacteria. However, studies directly comparing the growth of bacteria in raw versus heat-treated samples – as opposed to the enzyme quantities left behind - do not find enormous differences. For example, take this 2001 study on the growth of a Listeria bacteria found that both raw and pasteurized milk did about the same.

What’s more, some studies suggest that homogenization and pasteurization might even INCREASE the antimicrobial qualities of milk, specifically lactoferrin and lysozyme, such as this 2006 Italian study.

Milk for the Intolerant?

So what about the raw milk lactase claim. I’ve read this statement countless times over, even in major newspapers. But it’s incorrect. However, raw milk does contain lactic acid bacteria – notably species of Lactobaccili and Lactococci. These bacteria are naturally found in milk and ferment lactose into lactic acid using their handy enzyme B-galactosidase. Lactic acid bacteria are also added to milk to create cultured milk products, such as yogurt. The lactic acid produced gives yogurt its distinctive sour taste.

So while milk itself contains no lactase, its natural bacteria can produce it thereby reducing the tummy upsetting lactose in raw milk. Killing off the lactobaccili – as pasteurization will likely do – means no happy lactose reduction.

But here’s a thought. For there to be significant reduction in lactose via these bacteria, there would also have to be significant quantities of lactic acid – better known as spoiled milk. If your raw milk doesn’t taste sour, it’s probably got plenty of lactose and will probably hurt your tummy.

Even the FDA powerpoint rebuttal from the Campaign for Real Milk says there is little good data on what heat treatment does to microbial lactase and presents only anecdotal evidence that lactose intolerant folks can drink raw milk.

Until I see the double-blind food challenge data showing that raw milk is digestible in lactose intolerant people, I remain particularly unconvinced of this claim (there is one study but it is just comparing homogenized versus not homogenized and found no difference) . Africans and Middle Easterners evolved the ability to digest lactose into adulthood some 10,000 years ago, after they domesticated the cow and started drinking its milk. If raw milk was so digestible all on its own, what is the use of the extended lactase gene? Why did only milk-drinking populations seem to benefit from it?

Deep, Milky Thoughts

Raw milk contains bacteria, both good and bad. Raw milk, which accounts for around 1% of milk sales in the US, contributes very little to the burden of food poisoning in the country. Raw milk comes replete with its own bacteria fighting powers, but in the end is not overwhelmingly better at staving off culture growth. It’s very likely, however, that raw milk is cleaner to begin with, as nearly all raw milk dairies have grass fed cows and far less cramped feeding and milking conditions than giant industrial dairies. It’s also plausible that raw milk is more digestible to people with lactose intolerance, but we are lacking data. If you happen to be one of the lucky folk, why not try a blind taste test at home and see what happens?

So while I remain ho-hum about raw milk as a clean and lactose-intolerant friendly food, as we’ll see in the next article, raw milk DOES show some very tangible health benefits: higher levels of omega-3 fatty acids, higher levels of cancer-fighting conjugated linoleic acid, a bit more vitamins and possibly more calcium…and yes…it may indeed fight allergies. Claims linking pasteurized milk (as opposed to milk in general) to Parkinson’s, autism, ear infections and ADHD, however, don’t stand up to the litmus test that is actual evidence.

Check in next time...until then, I probably won’t be drinking any raw milk. But that’s just because I haven’t got any.

Under the Underground Nerdcore Movement: Meet Baddd Spellah, Kickass Nerdcore Music Producer

Anne Casselman — 2007-12-06T06:05:00-06:00

I have long considered myself a big nerd, with a touch of pride. But only realized how soft core my shade of nerdiness was when I happened on a whole new genre of music known as nerdcore, or “geeksta” rap. It’s a type of hip hop where far-from-fly dorks rap about topics like Star Wars ("Fett’s Vette” by MC Chris) and physics ("What We Need More Of Is Science” by MC Hawking).

(Related: ”For Those About to Hypothesize: We Salute You: A top-ten list to brighten the day of even the most oppressed Petri-dish slave” January 24, 2007).

So it should come as no surprise that Vancouver, a city with a thriving hi-tech sector and clubs that pulse with hip-hop, is home to the genre’s equivalent of Timbaland.

David Cheong is an art director for video games by day but works as nerdcore’s Midas at night, lending his golden touch to sparse raps under the alias Baddd Spellah. So what’s his niche? In the words of one nerdcore artist MC Router, he’s the “awesomest beat smith.”

Nerdcore’s lyrics make it clever and dorky. Spellah’s rhythms and added sounds make it head-nodding cool. Witness his polish job on MC Chris’ “Fett’s Vette.” He adds the subtle layers of badass that make hip-hop beats so damn appealing - but in a way that never deviates from nerdcore’s sincere heart.

It’s this skill that’s gotten Spellah working on the tunes of nerdcore luminaries. Just this past spring Spellah produced the “godfather of nerdcore” MC Frontalot‘s latest album “Secrets from the Future.” It’s probably the biggest coup for Spellah’s nerdcore career, which has spanned eight years and over a dozen nerdcore artists - along with accompanying countless all-nighters.

Last summer I weaseled my way into a recording session at Baddd Spellah’s home studio. As I knocked on the door of his East Vancouver house the cartoon avatar on his myspace page came to mind: an asian man in black framed glasses with lips pulled back and teeth bared. In direct contrast to that an unassuming man clad in a plaid shirt and khaki cords answered the door. He was thoughtful and deliberate in the way that reeks of competence.

That evening he was working with MC Jomega, aka Johanna Gustafson, a striking blonde Langley school teacher who sports periodic table socks and a voice that could slide like a trombone. Before long I was holding her lyrics up getting glances from her lemon-lime smiling eyes. “It’s the nerdcore chapter and we’re showing what it’s really worth,” she raps over some oompa loompa beats. Spellah mans Ableton Live on his computer in the next room.

A poster of Jay-Z and Bill Gates shaking hands sits above his screen. “You know its funny, those are the two spheres that are making a lot of money fly around the world right now: rap music and computers,” he says. Small wonder the marriage between the two is such a hit.

Spellah plays the first take back to MC Jomega. When it gets to the end where she says “peace out” she tilts her head forward and slaps it with her palm: “What a doooo-ooork!”

But it’s part and parcel of the genre. MC Frontalot, who gave the genre its name in the song “Nerdcore Hiphop” back in 2000, started life off as Damien Hess, a web developer and founder of his high school’s Monty Python fan club.

Since then its ranks have swelled and spread across the world. Last year MC Lars’ song “Download this Song” reached #29 on the Australian music charts. There’s even an upcoming documentary titled “Nerdcore Rising” on the topic. Needless to say, for a genre that just got named seven years ago, it’s doing just fine. And here’s why.

Between doubling the choruses of the recording MC Jomega bounces up and exclaims to no one in particular: “This is the most fun I could possibly be having!” The microphone’s popstand, MacGyvered from a clothes hanger and covered with an orphaned sock, bobs in agreement. Listening to her, so did I.

The Pros and Cons of Sushi

Anna Gosline — 2007-11-29T02:40:00-06:00

Japan is one of the healthiest countries in the developed world, with high life expectancy rates and lower incidences of of both cancer and cardiovascular disease. It must be all the sushi, right? Maybe. With its fish-rich flavors and low-fat appeal, traditional sushi is a health wonder. But much of the fish and seafood popular in sushi also comes with unwanted additives: chemical contaminants from polluted seas, such as mercury and PCBs, along with vicious pathogens including parasitic worms and deadly bacteria.

So is sushi a handy health food or a toxic roll of deadly doom and destruction?

Cons:

1) Worms. Like pretty much everyone else on the planet, fish are home to parasitic worms. One of the more common fish worms is a round worm named Anisakis simplex. They can be killed by a nice long period of deep-freezing, as can other round or tapeworms. Freezing is now law in the European Union, recommended in the FDA Food Code and Health Canada guide, but spotting parasites is up to the highly-trained chef in Japan.

Unfortunately, Anisakis can go on to harm unsuspecting sushi eaters even if frozen. People may develop allergic reactions to the worm, which can be triggered even if the squirmer is dead. One survey of Spaniards found that a full 13% of patients in clinics show some allergic sensitization to Anisakis proteins, while 19% of people who had other allergies had a full, clinical allergy to the worm. Sensitization was greater in regions of Spain where fish eating was sporadic and fish usually consumed raw. Similarly, a 1992 Japanese study found that 10% of the healthy population was sensitized to Anisakis .

2) Bugs. Fish and seafood also carry pathogens such as the deadly genus of Vibrio bacteria, and well as algae that squeeze out such delightful compounds as the terrifying paralytic shellfish toxin. From the FDA: “The toxicosis is particularly serious in elderly patients, and includes symptoms reminiscent of Alzheimer’s disease. All fatalities to date have involved elderly patients.” No scallop maki for grandma, eh?

For a full list of fun, check this FDA site here. Please note that some bad bugs and their associated toxins are denatured by cooking (Salmonella, Botulism, Vibrio species), but others can survive freezing and cooking and pretty much anything you throw at them (Listeria, which is very bad for the pregnant lady, and shellfish toxins).

3) Mercury is likely the top concern for fish eaters, raw or otherwise. Mercury is a neurotoxin and is thought to be especially damaging to small children and developing fetuses. They type of mercury found in seafood is methylmercury, which can bioaccumulate through the food chain, meaning that large, long-lived, fish-eating (piscivorous) fish can store up high levels in their flesh. The worst offenders are tilefish, swordfish, king mackerel and shark species. Some kinds of tuna, including big eye, are high as well. Everyone agrees that mercury is bad, what is less clear are the acceptable levels of consumption.

[Excuse the obtuse amount of math to follow]

The FDA cut off for safety is 1 part per million ppm (or 1 microgram/per gram of fish), and the WHO safe intake limit is set at 1.6 micrograms per kilogram of body mass per week. This level is meant for all folks but was set to protect fetuses from excessive mercury poisoning via their mother’s meals.

According to the FDA, your average yellow fin tuna has .325 ppm or .325 ug mercury/gram of fish. An average 70 kilo lady could therefore eat 112 ug weekly of mercury, which is 344 grams or 12 ounces of yellow fin tuna. The EPA’s more stringent cut off is just 0.01 ug/kd per day or about 49 ug per week for the 70 kilogram lady...or about 5 ounces of yellow fin tuna.

So if a tuna maki roll has 3 ounces of tuna then you’d end up with 1.5 to 4 tuna rolls per week, depending on how conservative you feel.

Of course this is all dependent on those initial FDA measures of methylmercury concentrations being accurate for each species of fish reported. A recent survey of tuna rolls from Los Angeles sushi restaurants by the environmental organization GotMercury.org, found and average mercury concentration of 0.72 parts per million, which is a heck of a lot more than tuna is supposed to be.

4) Organic pollutants. Dioxins and PCBs (Polychlorinated biphenyls) are industrial pollutants that accumulate in the fatty flesh of fishes (unlike mercury which binds to proteins). They are carcinogens and endocrine disruptors, can cause developmental and immune problems and just a whole lotta crap. Again, everyone knows they are bad, it’s just the concentration we have to worry about.

As they tend to be fat soluble, it’s the fatty salmon fish and friends that build up very high levels. A 2004 study by a group at the University at Albany, New York evaluated the levels of these compounds in farmed and wild salmon from different places around the world. They found high levels of these pollutants in farmed fish from around the globe, notably Scotland, the Faeroe Islands, Maine, Eastern Canada, Western Canada and Norway.

Based on EPA data on acceptable levels of consumption, the authors calculated safe number of monthly 8 ounce meals of the different fish. The worst fish are safe if you eat zero to half a meal per month. The least contaminated salmon were wild Coho, Pink and Chum salmon from BC and Alaska. Of those, the authors concluded that we can eat four to eight meals per month, or 32 to 64 ounces. Check out the graph comparing all samples here.

So if there are around 3 ounces of salmon in your average roll that means you could eat up to 31 rolls per month of the really good stuff and about 1 roll of the bad stuff (or none of the Scottish crap).

As with mercury, there is likely to be wide variation in pollutant levels and it’s hard to determine the safety of your sushi dinner at the restaurant. There is no doubt that wild is best, so ask your sushi chef. Especially if you live in Europe.

Pros

1) Omega-3, baby. Happy fatty fishes and seafood, such as salmon, are high in long chain omega-3 fatty acids (DHA and EPA) that have so many health benefits, I just cant’ bare to list them all. Okay fine: they reduce the risk of heart disease, they might help in warding off depression, they make for smart babies, less aggressive juvy prisoners, protect against and/or slow the progression of Alzheimer’s Disease, maybe even arthritis and other stuff and wow!

2) Worth the risk. Indeed omega-3s are SO very good for you, that last year researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health suggested that the benefits of eating fish (especially for the heart) outweighed the risks from contamination. While not everyone agreed with their optimistic interpretation of studies on the death-protective effects of eating loads ‘o fish, seeing as heart disease continues to be the number one killer in the US and Canada, I see their point.

Also, the study linked above on maternal fish consumption and child IQ showed that mothers who ate the most fish (more than 340 grams or 12 ounces of fish per week) had kids who scored highest on IQ tests. They also had showed the most prosocial (nice) behavior. Indeed the authors quite controversially suggest that the benefit of omega-3s on brain development during gestation outweighed the possible harm from the neurotoxic effects of mercury - though because actual mercury exposure levels were not measured, we can’t truly be sure of optimal level.

BONUS: Now here’s a special treat for all you inquisitive readers. Read this article on the “Dangers of Sushi” in the UK’s favorite tabloid newspaper, the Daily Mail and find all the factual errors! I’ve counted about seven so far, not including the dubious scare-tactic interpretations of actual facts.